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MS Releases New Media Player Firefox Plugin

Posted by kdawson on from the windows-only dept.

SilentChris writes "Microsoft today released a new Media Player plugin for Firefox that resolves the problems users of the older version were experiencing. According to the company's Port 25 blog, it's backwards compatible with Windows Media Player 6.4. The plugin is for Windows XP and Vista only, but if you have to watch WMV video at least it's less likely to crash your browser."

6 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Meh by hpavc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Its something they can point to in court that will save them a lot more than it cost to develop it.

    Wonder who will get blamed for the arbitrary code executions in the thing, Firefox or Microsoft. Every vulnerability/bug media player has will likely point to Firefox, instantly overnight Firefox's vulnerability/bug list will jump in size.

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    members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
  2. Re:Or the better (free, as in choice) option by fermion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I now use VLC as a substitute for everything, even as a DVD player. All commercial players, WMP, Quicktime, Realplayer are suspect. They all have the ability to take over the computer and launch other apps, at least the browser. I know the integration can be helpful, but we are not in the 1980's. I do know how to open an application on my own.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  3. Re:wmv files??? by blackmonday · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You know who's guilty of using crappy MS streaming media? None other than NPR.org. You have 2 choices - Windows Media or Real. How's that for crappy choices.

  4. I wonder if... by Whuffo · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Do you suppose this special version of Media Player has a benefit to Microsoft? Of course it does; why waste programmers otherwise.

    So what does Microsoft get from this - besides that ephemeral "protect WMV market share" stuff?

    How about usage data? Media Player has been sending information back to MS for years; OS version, GUID, etc. Now they can also collect data about Firefox installs. I suspect that data has value to MS - and very well may be the reason for this unexpected release.

    It's not as though Firefox users haven't been able to view WMV files, is it?

  5. Re:wmv files??? by Abalamahalamatandra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just do what I do - decode the Javascript to find the actual location of the Real streams (I like the quality better than the WMV streams), then use command-line mplayer to stream it out and reencode it to MP3.

    Now if Apple would just release tools or docs for creating enhanced podcast files for something other than a crappy command-line tool for OSX, I could make a rocking NPR podcast with skippable segments, but noooo...

  6. IE vs. WMP by BRUTICUS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    could this imply that MS considers Media Player more important than Internet Explorer now? I mean I couldn't really see MS providing apple with a plugin for Quicktime. Is MS getting serious about the media player war...and MP3 players?

    Zune 2.0