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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.
Because it's absolutely ridiculous that I have to install a third-party driver to get a major OS to recognize a filesystem that has existed for ages? Microsoft has finally caved in and acknowledged that Linux exists. Why not support its filesystems, at least as ready-only?
Honestly, you'd think they'd want to make it easy to move data from Linux to Windows, but right now it's only easy going the opposite direction.
This reminds me of the days you could run IE5, Windows Media Player 6.0 (don't update to 7 it's garbage!), Paint, Notepad, MSN Messenger and it was all good.
File manager turning into IE or FTP and vice versa was awesome and the software very lightweight. Pinnacle of GUI, of course Active Desktop was the first sign of garbage you had to disable so you had the first signs of microsoft turning really evil and crappy.
Great games and software in the quicklaunch if you wanted, including the almost-real DOS prompt. Use Winamp for music, as WMP doesn't have a playlist anyway. Fool around in the sound recorder if you wish. Even the minesweeper and solitaire were both the real versions.
VLC is an open source project though. Microsoft used to be the evil empire who spoke of the GPL as a cancer. It took being humbled by Google in the mobile market to make them decide to embrace open standards. It's impressive, but it's still Windows. Wake me up when bash is the default shell.
Microsoft has decided to start using the wheel. I remember sometime before switching permanently to Linux when I noticed IE couldn't display PNG transparency. It was probably the last Windows-related facepalm I ever made as a Windows user.
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