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."

Comments

Re:Bad enough I pay for microtransactions in MMO's

[_avs_007]

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.

XBMC FTW

[dmacleod808]

On top of all the VLC comments above... if you want a *Free* media center alternative... XBMC is the way to go.

Re:Bad enough I pay for microtransactions in MMO's

[slew]

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.

Re:Bad enough I pay for microtransactions in MMO's

[marcosdumay]

If you look at how much time it takes to install Linux compared to Windows and reinstall everytime there's an update, you are really not truly saving any money.

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.