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Windows 8 Won't Play DVDs Unless You Pay For the Media Center Pack
An anonymous reader writes "You may already know that Microsoft plans to sell Windows Media Center as a separate, paid pack, but now the company has revealed that Windows 8 will also stop default support for DVD playback. You'll only be able to play DVDs and Blu-rays if you upgrade to the Media Center pack. 'Acquiring either the Windows 8 Media Center Pack or the Windows 8 Pro Pack gives you Media Center, including DVD playback (in Media Center, not in Media Player), broadcast TV recording and playback (DBV-T/S, ISDB-S/T, DMBH, and ATSC), and VOB file playback. Pricing for these Packs, as well as retail versions of Windows 8, will be announced closer to the release date. To give you some indication of Media Center Pack pricing, it will be in line with marginal costs.'"
In a comment, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky elaborates: "(marginal is small, honest, and we just haven't determined the final prices yet based on ongoing work but we are aiming for single digit dollars but we don't control the truly marginal costs). We wanted to include Media Player for everyone without everyone incurring the cost even if they don't even have an optical drive."
I don't think it's that they are trying to nickel and dime you. I think they were trying to reduce cost of the base OS, by not including the licensing fees for MPEG2.
On top of all the VLC comments above... if you want a *Free* media center alternative... XBMC is the way to go.
There Can Be Only One...
Just download VLC already.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
While Microsoft is certainly happy to nickle-and-dime for things over which they have control(Oh, you want us to flip the bit that allows you to bind to AD? $90 please.) DVD playback is arguably in a different category.
Thanks to the wonders of the DMCA, and possibly a raft of not-yet-expired MPEG-LA patents, it still costs money to legally ship a DVD decoder in the US, despite the fact that implementations of deCSS and MPEG2 are seriously old news.
Especially for the driveless consumer machines and the business masses, forking over a per-copy fee to the DVD cartel just doesn't make any sense for either MS or their customers...
Um, Microsoft makes its C/C++ compiler available for free, along with the Windows SDK. You're probably thinking of Visual Studio, but Microsoft makes a basic version for C/C++ free as Visual C++ Express; effectively, a basic Visual Studio edition purely for C/C++ coding without the enterprise features. If you need those features, you're probably doing more than hobbyist development/basic development.
Noting the "get-of-my-lawn" comment, perhaps the OP was thinking about Solaris.
A long time ago (>10 years), Sun (now Oracle) unbundled the C-compiler from the standard Solaris 2.x package and they started charging extra for their Ansi C-compiler (and it might have been $100 come to think about it)... The theory was that you didn't need the compiler if you were just using Solaris for a workstation running pre-compiled apps (there was an old BSD cc around to recompile the kernel, but it was K&R only), but if you were a Wall-street Quant, you had the money to pay extra for the privilage of writing your own code so they were gonna charge you for the privlage. Of couse the pre-compiled GCC binaries worked just fine on Solaris, so it didn't bother most folks who were tinkering with their own code.
MS-WMP won't even play mkv files.
In Windows 7 it will. It'll open the container, and if needed, it can go off to the Internet to download the codec. It has no problem at all with the h.264 MKV DVD rips I've been making.
No one really knows what a full MacOS X license costs, because Apple has never sold one.
I take it you've only been paying attention the last couple of years...
As recently as 10.5 you could buy Leopard for $129 retail, or roughly $60 if you were an education customer. The "Family Pack" install was $199. This was the model on the previous iterations as well.
Snow Leopard (10.6) was upgrade-only (and $29) IIRC; although the disk didn't seem to actually check for a previous installation.
#DeleteChrome
As recently as 10.5 you could buy an upgrade to Leopard for $129, or roughly $60 if you were an education customer. The "Family Pack" upgrade was $199. This was the model on the previous iterations as well.
Fixed that for you.
$100 isn't too bad. NeXTStep 3.3 and up were $800 for the OS, and $5000 for the compiler.
And without the $5000 compiler you couldn't use GCC, because the header files came with the compiler package.
Pain in the butt.
It takes around 25 minutes to install Ubuntu and grab libdvdcss, and w/ 12.04, one round of downloads to patch it to a current state.
It takes around 1 hour to install Windows 7 on the same hardware, and around 6-8 separate and massive downloads (one weighed in at over 500MB) and 4-6 reboots over the next couple of days to get all the updates.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Are you just missinformed, right? You are repeating MS's propaganda just because it is the only thing you ever readed, right?
The point is, you don't reinstall Linux. When a new version comes out, you upgrade (that means, you log as root and type aptitude dist-upgrade, or whatever applies to your distro - I know, Windows users have a differenet meaning for the word "upgrade"), when you change your hardware, you simply put your disk on the new machine, when you replace your disk, you simply copy the contents to the new disk.
I can think about 2 exceptions. When Linux switched to 2.6 a few distros didn't upgrade clearly, and when people started to adopt 64 bit distros it was easier to reinstall than to switch everything. Compare that with Windows, that still self destructs after a few months.
Rethinking email
MS is a company in the US. They have to pay MPEG-LA for licenses for things like their h.264 decoder, DVD/Blu-Ray decoder stacks. They can't avoid it. GNU/Linux can, because it's an international effort, and US organizations like MPEG-LA can't do anything outside of the USA - not for lack of trying. MS is within their reach, so MS has to comply with their pricing. Google is in the same boat with Chome.
If you run Linux, then technically YOU are on the hook to get the licenses required if you pull down the av decoders. Ubuntu, for example, isn't packaged with everything you need to play encrypted DVDs or Blu-Rays, but those things are easily added. If you live in the US, just be aware that MPEG-LA could sue you if they find out.