Slashdot Mirror
Windows Media Player 11 Released
filenavigator writes "Microsoft issued a press release today publicizing the release of Windows Media Player 11. Looks like the major updates in this version are for the Microsoft marketing engine. Features boasted by Microsoft include better integration with media players sanctioned by them, and integration with their new URGE music service. Additionally, and more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software. Interested parties can download a free copy"
Hey, can we wait until the comments before the anti-MS vitrol and fud? Does it have to start right in the article itself? Sheesh.
I tried apt, but it didn't work. Does anybody have the source packages so I can compile it myself?
The big problem is that all the videos that I'm interested in are already uploaded to YouTube.
All the audio I'm interested in is uploaded to BitTorrent.
I prefer to live offline, away from my computer, so all the slickness in the world doesn't mean squat when I'm not going to be sitting in front of the monitor anyway.
Features boasted by Microsoft include better integration with media players sanctioned by them
I think these guys have got this one covered: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
"Interested parties can download a free copy" Richard Stallman has a word to say to the submitter.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Save the world from WMP 11.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Can someone tell me what the deal is with WMP's GUI? I noticed around WMP 7 that they started breaking every Windows convention in the book. I stuck with Mplayer2 for a long time until I discovered Media player classic. Has the GUI improved? Does it blend in well with Vista's way of doing things and that's why its different? Or is it just poorly designed and confusingly implemented like I expect it is?
Or maybe you'd rather try to slide a tiny dark slider along a tiny dark track and skip around that way.
Didn't *anyone* at microsoft take an HCI class in college?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
So I have to go through an annoying and possibly bogus WGA check and pray it doesn't result in a false positive if I want to download Windows Defender, you know, a security tool, but I they impose no such checks if I want to download a simple DRM-infested media player? Nice priorities there, Microsoft.
I might install it just to keep things up-to-date with the WMV support. I use Media Player Classic and VLC for most videos anyway, but I still installed previous versions of WMP so that the codecs it installed were complete, and I assume this will have newer codec versions too.
In other words, it's a back-end update for me. It sure as shit doesn't have the functionality/ease of use that something like MPC has.
I'll wait for the Linux version.
[Insert pithy quote here]
From TFA, it's only for WinXP.
I have a Sandisk Sansa e270. For some reason, I just don't want to buy an iPod Nano. Guess I'm just cheap? This is the next best thing - 6gb of flash, small, similar interface, half the price.
I used to use WMP10 to sync my files. It wasn't the most convenient method, but it beat doing the sync by turning the Sansa into a USB drive (it reboots forever, updating some databases). Selecting which files to sync up was fairly simple, and the syncing was fast. The biggest complaint I had was that it didn't really understand the concept of syncing on multiple computers (home and office). One has to become the main computer and the other... I dunno.
I installed the WMP11 beta, because I was hoping that that part of syncing would have been fixed. Well, I regret that decision now. Luckily, I'm going to reinstall this computer soon anyway.
Basically, syncing is incredibly slow now, the interface much less intuitive and for some reason it keeps uploading copies of the same files. I gave up on getting that sync right. I'm downloading the final version, I'll install it probably tomorrow.
m
Sorry, but I think that the PC media player was perfected win Winamp 2.8. Literally. I think it's about as easy to use and powerful as you can ever get. iTunes is impossibly bloated and buggy. Windows Media Player is the most confusing interface I could ever imagine. Winamp is tiny, very powerful (if you want it to be), and *very* easy to use. I don't care how many shiny buttons MS MP and ITunes add, they both just get continueally worse with every version (and admittedly, so did the early Winamp 5.x versions). And really, how many different possible ways do you need to play music? How many iterations of "play" ans "stop" can there possibly be?
Why is it microsoft can't make a gui that doesn't take more screen space than the actual content?
Freeamp, which is now called Zinf due to complaints from the Winamp people, is what you want. No ads. No phoning home. No DRM. No nonsense. Open source. Runs on Windows and Linux.
MPEG-4 is just as standard and cross-platform as MPEG-1 was. Blame Microsoft for not supporting it because they want you to use the hilarious "WMV" format for everything.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Can anyone tell me whether this new version will play .ogg files by default? If not where can one grab a plug-in? Thanx.
Foobar 2000
It's FOSS, so the GUI is generally crap (it's as unitiuitive as other media players while still being ugly and unskinnable by default) but it's very lightweight and unobtrusive. It's been in development a long time and is quite mature.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I just tried installing the new media player, and i want to remove it before it causes any more damage. It seemed to want to eat all the metadata tags from my mp3 files and replace it with something else. For some reason, it wants to change all the artist and title info from a correctly labeled Al Green album and wants to replace it with Connie Francis. If i relabel it correctly and have it rescan the files it tries to label it incorrectly again, even though i have the option to only add missing information and not the overwrite all media information setting to get information from the internet. It is weird. I i go to play the song, a picture of Connie Francis shows up, even though it says the artist name is Al Green. And Al Green only has three songs but Connie has the rest. Same with my Beatles Abbey Road album. It has three songs but cant find the rest even though the tags are all correct in the correct folder. Also it is MUCH slower searching through my media files for changed things now. It definitely needs to go away and i will use something else!
Not only should you not get WMP11 intentionally, the fact that there's a RTM for it should make you think about turning off Windows Update (if you haven't already). At least make sure you have a disk-image backup before installing it, or you'll probably be kicking yourself down the road.
y er/11/readme.aspx:
w ww.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/re adme.aspx
= 49&PostID=144193
From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/pla
"Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses)."
"Digital media files must be in stored in monitored folders for media sharing to work properly in Windows Media Player 11."
"Content that is protected with media usage rights cannot be played in Windows Media Player 10 if a computer already has the Windows Media Format 11 Runtime installed."
The following issue from the Beta release isn't mentioned in the official release notes, but the fact that it appeared in the beta indicates that MS was preparing their DRM platform for a new time-limit "feature" that can be applied to recorded TV on their Media Center products (at the request of broadcasters, of course):
"Recorded TV shows that are protected with media usage rights, such as some TV content recorded on premium channels, will not play back after 3 days when Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows XP is installed on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time."
At time of posting, this could still be found at:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Eah4zybQy4sJ:
I'm not pulling that speculation out of my butt, either. They already add more restrictions to DVD playback than any other software or consumer DVD player does. DVD playback is prohibitied in Media Center Edition when your display device is set to > 640 x 480 resolution (as is the case for HDTV use):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323
Even today, as of Rollup 2, Media Center Edition renders recorded TV unplayable after two weeks when the broadcaster requests it:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/rss.aspx?ForumID
I would be extremely surprised if down the road a bit we don't discover that WMP11 is a trojan horse for a slew of previously unheard of content restrictions.
By day I'm a developer on the Microsoft platform. By night I'm an XP Media Center Edition user who's scared & angry enough to invest research time I don't have into MythTV & [Ubuntu || Mandriva || Fedora]. As far as home usage goes, I'm sorry, but this former Redmond fanboy / apologist is done with MS.
Pi Ran Out
I can certainly download something that claim to be a copy of WMP11, but all I get is a pop-up complaining about WGA. Now, mind, I've got a license of windows. I can't find it. So I downloaded Windows XP. HELO Fair Use. Of course MS doesn't want me to see Media Player 11 because other people have stolen Windows from them.
In fairness, let me say that I have one Windows machine, and it exists almost entirely for Yahoo Music Player streaming into my living room, and for Counter-Strike on occasion. My other computers are all Ubuntu boxen, save the mac mini I got last week.
WGA = DRM = record players that won't play everyone's records. My Fair Use rights are being violated and no one will make it stop.
While I'm ranting, let me talk about the Angels & Airwaves CD. I had just explained DRM to my uncle for the first time when I picked up this album. On first seeing the actual disc, I was greeted with some 'SoundTone' or some such nonsense logo by the FBI warnings the media companies think I want cluttering up CD art. Knowing that RedBook is RedBook, I could only assume this had less to do with Sound or Tone and more to do with Fucking My Shit Up Because The Companies Know They Can. Sure enough, I popped it in and it wouldn't play.
When I bought that CD, I bought what was advertised as a RedBook disc. What I got was a $20 coaster that I can't use (because seriously, if I'm listening on my computer I'm not going to go searching for the disc). I have since vowed to download my music, because downloading leaves me feeling less like I got 0wned. I had stopped downloading music (remember the Yahoo Music mention?), and now they've reminded me why I should.
-knewter
I consider myself pretty adept at figuring out things for myself, especially when it comes to new software, especially when it comes to audio software. After a short ammount of time, I have been able to get advanced, professional audio programs up and running (mind you, on a basic level), even with such daunting software as Pro Tools, Cubase, Sibelius, Finale, etc.
So I downloaded WMP11, and I suddenly found myself staring at the screen, not having a friggin' clue where to even begin. It was literally the first time I felt like I had been stumped by a seemingly simplistic piece of software. Yes, there were all sorts of pretty buttons, some of which I REEEEEEEALY wanted to press - but all I actually wanted to do was play some fucking Zeppelin. Clicking on those fancy buttons only made things worse...I got lost and actually gave up. This has to be the worst GUI I have ever seen. I can't WAIT for my father to download this, a man who has to be reminded every time he touches the remote to press the CBL button, or he'll change the channel on the TV rather than the Cable Box.
It brought back a memory I thought I had repressed, when after almost 20 years of piano training, I began playing the organ which includes a four-octave keyboard to be played by your feet. I felt like a 5 year old all over again, my co-ordination just vanishing. My ego took a huge beating then, and it's taken another one just now.
I stick with iTunes because I like the "browser", which filters the songs by Genre, then Artist, then album. Yes, I know it's bloated, but I've managed to forgive them for that. Meanwhile, I found JetAudio to be a pretty good plyaer, and am downloading Media Player Classic as I type.
I'm still searching for the one player that "gets it right". Any more ideas? Send'em my way...
Is it just me or do other people also consider the WMP one of the shittiest pieces of Bundleware we still have to put up with? A bloated memory and performance hog, long outrun by it's free and shareware equivalents, a relic of the nineties with features bolted on left, right and center and a performance as bad as ever, despite computer power having increased ten-fold since back in the days.
WinAmp and VLC could do things years ago that this sorry excuse of 'convienienceware' will ever be able to do. No?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've found foobar2000 to be very nice. It's a typical hacker-player that can be mod'ed to do anything you want it to, but the base is just a simple, lightweight music player with a library, superb format-support (except iTunes MPEG4 lossless) and otherwise no fuzz.
I ditched Winamp5 for Foobar when I saw Winamp using 200MBs+ of RAM with my current music-library. Plus Winamp is shit and doesn't support unicode.Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
WMP11 does have at least one useful feature, which is that it will stream video to an Xbox 360... up till now you'd need to have a Windows Media Centre to do this.
Is it me or does the new WMP look almost exactly the same as Songbird?
Ah, just me then.