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Windows 10 To Feature Native Support For MKV and FLAC
jones_supa writes Windows Media Player is going to become a more useful media player for those who want to play geeky file formats. Microsoft has earlier confirmed that Windows 10 will come with native support for Matroska Video, but the company now talks about also adding FLAC support. Microsoft's Gabriel Aul posted a teaser screenshot in Twitter showing support for this particular format. It can be expected to arrive in a future update for people running the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Not many GUI changes seem to be happening around Media Player, but work is done under the hood.
This is support out of the box. WMP supports both with the proper Directshow filters.
Nope, I use high quality VBR MP3 for my music because a) it sounds great, b) it's supported on everything and c) it takes a lot less storage space. FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
No. FLAC is for idiots who don't see any reason to throw away some information that might be of use later (say when mixing, postprocession etc. the music) just because it saves a little space on a insanely cheap hard drive.
High quality MP3s sound good enough, I agree. But when I store something, I store it in the best quality possible, even if I don't need that quality right now in everyday use. Things change, and I might need it later on.
Hard drives are cheap. Ripping all my CDs once as FLAC means that I don't have to shuffle through 700+ CDs to find the one I'm looking for.
Also, some of my older CDs were already unreadable or hard to read. Having a backup in original quality is important.
I buy music online in FLAC or WAV format from:
Bandcamp.com
Bleep.com
Boomkat.com
FSOLdigital.com
Junodownload.com
and others
Or I download legally for free in FLAC format from Archive.org.
It allows for subtitles to be stored and turned on and off at the viewers discretion. Most other formats require a separate subtitle file or hard coded subs that cannot be turned off and are part of the video. There are far more foreign films aside from anime that benefit from a format like this. Not to mention having more than just dual audio and English subtitles like in anime. You can have a great many audio streams and singles for many reasons in a single file that is really changeable by the end user.