Slashdot Mirror
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.
has been supporting these formats for how long?
WMA is dead and there's no money to be made in compression format wars. Why not support the standards?
Flac has been around for 13 years. WTF?
I could see why FLAC would be considered a geeky format, but MKV? It's pretty common, is it not?
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
Oh wait....
The time to do that was 7-10 years ago
Not having FLAC and mkv support for a media player is simply insane. Those who cares at all for sound quality uses FLAC, even my tiny mp3 player support FLAC.
That MS "boycotted" FLAC for years because it doesn't support DRM and isn't a MS-patent trap, just hurt their desire to control all media consumption on MS-platforms; they forgot a "boycott" works both ways, and that people just used software like VLC that actually supported what people wanted.
Microsoft had an agenda to push Windows Media Audio Lossless, this has pretty much been abandoned now, hence the adoption of FLAC.
Apple are now in the same position, not including support for FLAC to push Apple Lossless on people.
Finally I will be able to play flacs at my friends without having them install separate codecs or players. Now if this was only possible for ogg/vorbis too!
Has anyone else noticed how much nicer Microsoft has been getting (with respect to supporting open standards) now that their market share is dropping? Smells like hypocrisy to me (I say that, but of course I want native support for these formats).
MKV and FLAC are not "geeky". MKV is simply a superior container format for video. Xvid has been on the way out for awhile now, and FLAC is necessary for people that truly care about audio quality, so it's more of an audiophile format. It could be said those people are "audio geeks", I suppose.
f u cn rd ths, u r prbbly a lsy spllr.
Glad you could make it Microsoft. Glad you could come to the party and support formats that we've had for years. Oh and please make sure you support the latest and greatest too and do a good job? Not like you've done for MP4.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Why should it have native support for ext2 or ext3?
You mean like ReFS
http://saveie6.com/
Foobar2000 is a clusterfark of bad plugins and a really weird interface that takes forever to figure out. It's IKEA. Lots of assembly required.
Consumers want a program that will play any media you throw at it, without it whining about codecs or DRM or any other unneeded pains in the ass; I know this is a stretch... but has anyone at MS considered that?
Guess not.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Or read-only would be more trivial to implement, so that poor sheeps that strolled out of the microsoft true path can migrate their data.
What I'd like to know is whether or not this means we don't have a install a codec park (like Shark007) just so we can get support for all the common video formats in Windows Media Center.
Talking of Windows Media Center, does Windows 10 actually improve on this awesome (but sadly neglected) piece of software - or are they going to squander the opportunity again like they did with Windows 8?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I stopped using Media Player back when you had to sign your life away in a bunch of EULAs and dialog boxes when it started up and had to use WGA just to download the latest version (required for something or other I forget now). VLC & WinAmp all the way.
I honestly think they found that the headache would be too large for the gain (not considering here the obvious fact that they are competing file systems for NTFS).
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
By that time it will look like something else. Maybe it will be Unix-based by then, and virtualize Windows installs for applications. Or they'll be out of business then.
Even Linux is moving on past those filesystems, except for the chunky-funky variety of embedded devices which don't use some adorable little flash filesystem you have to recook on your desktop, the ones which look more (internally) like someone shrunk the PC.
In the meantime, computing resources are cheap enough to waste them virtualizing Linux. Sometimes I boot an iso with gparted in vmware player and then connect devices to the virtual machine. It avoids so many embarrassing mistakes, it avoids reboots of the actual hardware with the stupidly-long PC POST, and you can use the same strategy on any modern operating system. That covers your ext maintenance operations. As for reading them, a very small virtual machine is sufficient to check, mount, and reshare filesystems to Windows via Samba.
Microsoft is used to controlling the dominant filesystem, they're not giving anyone a leg up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Then how about ZFS? No GPL virus there, while simultaneously being much farther along than btrfs and having a good kernel-level Linux port.
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.
sadly, GNU/Linux is turning into a bloated pile of rubbish the same as windows, the core systems arround the kernel have been taken over by idiot-savants with no common sense and no engineering ability.
I've used it quite a bit. Seriously, I'd rather use WMP than that crap if it weren't for the file format support. For example, double click on a media file in explorer and it'll add it to your playlist. Playlists are organized as tabs. The whole interface just sucks and very few people have the time to frak around with a bunch of buggy plugins that 'almost' work.
To me it's kind of a lost computing heaven, much like some of you nuts that used NeXT, BeOS, Amiga or whatever perfect "real Unix" that never really existed. Of course IE had to go first, replaced by firefox 0.x and 1.x, then the 64K resource limit got atrocious (Firefox 0.7 ; problem stabilized at version 0.9 ; then Steam as a huge offender) and then only the 2000/XP/2003 branch was viable. Had to move from that one to linux.
If Microsoft had ex3 and ext3 support, the cross-platform malware issue would explode. Do you REALLY want your Windows OS to have filesystem access to your Linux drives?
There's absolutely no reason at all you should use .wav. MP3 is fine due to a myriad of compatibility-related reasons.
FLAC is not new, it's a lossless format, meaning, it compresses audio but you don't lose quality in the process.
They are hobbyist filesystems, and serious Linux installations use others.
Really? I've been in the field since day one when Linus announced the birth of linux. I've seen thousands of linux systems in the field doing real work. To this day I have never come across a 3rd party file system on linix in the field.
I actually think you have it backwards. All the other filesystems seem to be for hobbyist, because that is all I have ever seen run them.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Am I stupid? Download k-lite codec pack and you have all the codecs you can imagine, which idiot is going to pay microsoft an other tax for a few codecs... I stay with windows 7, works fine... I have been having those codecs for years, for free... even under windows xp... Same is with iso file as drive DEAMON Tools lite, also for free. It's nice they have it, but not a reason to buy a new version of there shit...
Never. Microsoft is hoping that ExFAT will become the next filesystem for portable media - and hoping very much because they hold critical patents to impliment it. They aren't going to support a competing technology.
Not a reason to upgrade to Win 10. A tiny (180k ?) free download adds support for these if you want to use WMP.
This is a good step forward, but when is Windows going to have native support for ext2 or ext3 filesystems? They've only been around for about 20 years now.
http://www.fs-driver.org/
Mod parent up. I've logged into several thousand Linux systems in my career, some of them that power MAJOR components of MAJOR companies, and the only time I've seen ZFS or something similar was either in a testing environment or an archive appliance. Ext3 file system easily stores ~90% of the data on this planet.
I'm still going to uninstall Media Player as soon as I buy a new Windows box or upgrade to 10. I haven't used Media Player in probably 10 years now. Shit, even Winamp is outdated and no longer being developed but it still handles everything better than Media Player -- including FLAC.
WebM uses the MKV container. So to play video (lawfully) encoded by people who haven't paid the MPEG LA tax, you need an MKV demuxer.
Wow, about freaking time... Welcome to the MKV party... about 10 years late.
As to why it is geeky, I would say because at one time pretty much all anime coming out of Japan was MKV format.
They have probably noticed that the MS Media Player sucks, and that users are moving en masse to alternatives. Mostly to VLC.
About the ONLY reason I still use MS Media Player at all, is because it is integrated with the Windows Media Center. If there was a VLC version that worked as a Media Center and remote that didn't suck I would abandon it completely. I tried one version, but it wasn't really mature enough and wasn't all that usable.
As to how good it is VS other formats, MKV tend to be smaller, though I am not sure about some of the really HD stuff. I do know more than half of every MP4 I try to play makes my computer scream audio making it unusable, and getting subs to work is pretty hit and miss. MKV is pretty solid as it has been around for awhile, and VLC plays whatever I throw at it, though subs can still be an issue though not nearly as often, though I have seen some performance issues at times.
Anyway simply put a media player that only plays a small subset of the formats out there isn't much good. People have been messing about with Media Player for years with Codec packs and various other add ons for years trying to make it more useful than MS will let it be. Crazy.
MKV is only common for pirated non-streaming contents
"The WebM container is based on a profile of Matroska." Are you now claiming that WebM itself is uncommon?
You need weird-ass buggy fb2k plugins, but are only missing format support in WMP? Do you play a lot of ancient tracker music or something?
If you find the fb2k interface so intimidating perhaps you'd be better off with its much simpler cousin, Boom. Not sure if it's got much support for particularly oddball media formats though.
isn't disk space really cheap these days?
Spinning disks at home yes, Internet-connected disks no. A free Dropbox provides only 2 GB, for instance. And cellular ISPs tend to charge about $10 per GB uploaded or downloaded.
How does 320 kbps MP3 compare to FLAC when you're tandeming (lossy compression and then lossy recompression)? Sometimes when I buy a CD, I want to rip it into something from which I can transcode to 320 kbps or 128 kbps depending on where and when I plan to listen to music. I was under the impression that the distortions from repeated lossy reocmpression would compound quickly.
If there was an optical disc and it happened to be able to hold all your music (insert a sufficiently large value here to satisfy you), but it still skipped if you ran through your n-second buffer, would you still be using it?
Let n > the length of one piece of music and it's fine. If there were a digital audio player with a BD-ROM drive that could hold 25,000 minutes of music but started skipping if I were to jog for 4 minutes straight, that wouldn't be a problem. I could catch my breath every 3 minutes, and the BD player could catch its. That's why I bought an MP3 CD player years ago before sufficiently large solid state digital audio players became affordable, because MP3 allowed for a much larger skip buffer than a Red Book-only player.
Turns out, I don't care about carrying everything
That's fine if you just use music for background noise or for pacing exercise (like a ~120 BPM mix for walking), not so fine if you end up wanting to play a specific song in a specific circumstance.
VLCs UI constantly pisses me off - I just can't use it. Fortunately Media Player Classic is there, with the UI I like and no EULAs or DRM.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Uhhh...and the benefit to MSFT would be....what exactly? they have NTFS which works extremely well for their OS and for portables there is ExFAT which again works extremely well, so why would they care to open NTFS when there is no need?
Its not like the FOSSies would ever use anything made by MSFT anyway, hell many Linux advocates like Robert Pogson are so batshit against MSFT they have Voldemort when it comes to the company, they sure as hell isn't gonna use anything made by Redmond, they'd treat it like plague blankets.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But just for shits and giggles I took a 320k MP3 and recoded to 128k and compared it to the CD where I ripped it as 128k and honestly? I can't tell a difference between the two.
If you can't ABX a difference between CD to 128K mp3/aac/ogg and CD to 256-320K mp3 to 128K mp3/aac/ogg, then I guess that problem is solved. Thanks for testing this for us.
Microsoft has finally caved in and acknowledged that Linux exists. Why not support its filesystems, at least as ready-only?
Maugle: Hey boss, I have a great idea. Why not support ext2/3
Boss: Why?
Maugle: Because linux exists and people want to be able to access their files on the linux partition from their windows machine.
Boss: So we make it easier for people to migrate away from our software for no benefit to us what so ever?
Maugle: Exactly! Wait what?
Boss: Get back to work Maugle.
There's absolutely no reason at all you should use .wav.
"Absolutely no reason" is strong words when some tools for creating mix CDs still prefer .wav. Decode to .wav in a temporary folder, burn, delete .wav.
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.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Yes, I really do.
My other UID is three digits.
Read-only, sure. Just like Linux may have read-only access to Windows' NTFS drives. And a shared FAT32 partition (rw for both OSes) to exchange files.
Apple, Amazon, google are never going to natively support it on thier devices.
Except that WebM, the format that Google has pushed, IS USING MKV as a container.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They still seem to very much talk in language which pretends that something called Linux has never existed.
Get on with the news. Last months, Satya publicly shown a presentation on Azure that had a slide saying simply, "Microsoft loves Linux" (and no surprise there - he's pushing for Azure as the major revenue source to replace the aging model, and 20% of Azure VMs run Linux). Meanwhile, on developer side of things, VS 2015 ships with gdb-server remote debugging support specifically for the sake of Linux and Android, and .NET vNext announces Linux and OS X as officially supported platforms.
Sure, that's why you would use FLAC if you want to keep perfect audio. Also, the shittiness of MP3 is largely dependant on the encoder. Get the latest version, rip to 320 kbps MP3 and it will most definitely not sound like shit.
It has its annoyances but nothing I have found onerous to work around. Its possible to redefine the keyboard controls and I think it can be skinned (?).
What I like is "click anywhere is pause, scroll anywhere is volume", everything else is negotiable. Keyboard controls? In my living room? Damn Linux nerds! :p
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, at least we can use the fantastic GUI for media play....nevermind
Hmm. Makes sense.
ext is very non-robust, can lose entire filesystem if power goes out at wrong time. And fsck time is enormous compared to superior and more robust filesystems. I administer hundreds of servers, ext only used for boot
Plenty of lazy wanna-bees do things poorly and put organizations at risk and expense of greater downtime; you seriously make your employer wait for fsck of terabytes of ext3 data?
Plenty of lazy wanna-bees do things poorly and put organizations at risk and expense of greater downtime; you seriously make your employer wait for fsck of terabytes of ext3 data?
Sounds like you might be one of those lazy wanna-bees.
First, ext3 is a journaled file system so if you are waiting for a fsck on a it then you probably need to run it. Second, if your in a position where you are having to run a fsck on production data then your an idiot. If the system is so hosed that you have to run fsck, then you take that system out of the rotation and bring the back up system on line. Then you can run fsck at your leisure.
ext is very non-robust, can lose entire filesystem if power goes out at wrong time. And fsck time is enormous compared to superior and more robust filesystems. I administer hundreds of servers, ext only used for boot
I can't recall losing data on a ext3/ext4 file system but I do recall losing it on a rieserfs at one point. Now, if you are in a position where you can lose data in a real production environment because of something as simple as a power outage, then you probably shouldn't be in charge of hundreds of servers. Production servers have dual powersupplies plugged in to independent power sources such as separate UPS. The UPS themselves are only there to keep the systems alive till the generator backups can come on line. Point blank, if you lose data because of a power outage you are a moron.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification