Slashdot Mirror
Windows Media Player Set To Lose a Feature on Windows 7 (onmsft.com)
With Windows 7 reaching its end of life in less than a year, developers are likely to begin retiring features for the operating system. Kicking off the process of retiring features is Microsoft, which is retiring a feature in Windows Media Player, according to updated support documentation on its website. From a report: New metadata for music, TV shows and movies, will not be added to Windows Media Player. This means that additional information such as cover art, directors, actors, and more, will not display on Windows Media Player. This change also affects Windows Media Center on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.
Just turn off updates.
Seriously, when has that ever worked, I've never seen it.
Plus, why would you enable a spy feature on your own?
If not... don't care.
It's one of the first thing I reset file associations for. So I don't care about their metadata.
12:50 - press return.
I bet those who use that feature will be miffed. Both of them.
#LearnToCode and write your own!
And piss off the NPC "progressives" along the way as a bonus!
Seriously, who watches media with Windows Media Player when free players like MPC offer a much superior experience? MPC can even run custom HLSL pixel shaders on GPU, allowing videos to be enhanced in realtime on GPU (e.g. realtime sharpening, upconversion). You can even write your own .hlsl GPU pixel shader, hit CTRL+S, and MPC applies the custom pixel shader to video immediately. Windows Media Player is not capable of any such feats.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Why use something with an acronym of "WiMP" when VLC and other good options exist?
Am I the only one that thinks there is not a good reason for this? MS is shutting down a service that supplies metadata to Windows Media Player that affects all players on OS older than Windows 10. Why isn't Win10 affected? Surely there isn't anything that should break in metadata that would break the OS. This isn't like when MS turned off the PlaysForSure servers as they deprecated everything with those old systems. This seems to be a forced push to people using older Windows.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's probably the last time Microsoft will officially recognize Windows Media Center as existing.
But that's ok, because Cable companies will continue to encrypt every channel they legally can while renting you a CableCard, and the only software that you can get to decrypt it? Windows Media Center.
Legal lock-in for DVR rentals. And the cable companies wonder why we hate them.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I primarily continued to occasionally use WMP as a handy CD to MP3 ripper, and had already noticed some albums, old and new, where WMP in Windows 7 simply had no metadata for them. For general media purposes it tends to work okay, with some old 3rd party AVC codecs I installed years ago, better than the non-solutions provided in Windows 10. But I mostly use VLC anyway, and it also works for the odd blu-ray. Windows 10 won't even play a DVD anymore without purchasing an add-on.
VLC still exists. I have not used WIMP in freakin' years and have no reason to care if it becomes even more crippled than it already was. Same as Internut Exploiter, who gives a shit about it or Edge for that matter?
This is like a car manufacturer saying "since your car is 10 years old we're going to retire the taillights."
"... Microsoft is conspiring to cripple the OS like they did with XP..."
Microsoft is an extremely destructive and self-destructive company.
Never used meta data too much wasted time correcting it. I use the file name instead.
Tag editing hell.
Way better off using Picard to attach metadata to content if it doesn't already exist than allow some Microsoft service to fail miserably at it. While nothing of value is being lost in this instance it's very much time to put serious consideration into disabling updates to prevent intentional Microsoft sabotage.
What is this article even about? What the heck is an MP3?? Is that some old way to store music files or something?
I'm sorry you can't burn that MP3 that you recorded yourself because of the name for . . . reasons.
Most of the comments here are really missing the point. The moral of the story is If it needs external services to function YOU DON'T OWN IT. You can never OWN it.
Even if its OSS you might not be able to own it. At least there you'd have shot anyway at being able to implement some kind of patch to get whatever data it needs from some other source, or be able to obtain enough information to implement your own replacement service and or change where it points replace whatever certificate it requires etc.
Still we need some consume protections that require disclosing of external service dependencies and/or some rules requiring companies to support/maintain the services their products depend on for some minimum period of time as long as they are going concern.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Win7 MC is for recording TV only. For playback, we use Kodi, VLC, Plex, anything except Windows-whatever.
We stopped accepting MSFT updates about 3 yrs ago when they changed to license to be anti-privacy. We also blocked all Windows systems from internet access except for schedule data and for Quicken stock updates. We aren't stupid enough to use Windows as a desktop.
The only, absolutely only, reason we still use 7MC is for the free schedule data. For recording TV, Kodi + HDHR devices easily wins. Heck, if we were tied to Windows (why?), there is NextPVR.
First KB4480970 breaking local networking, not being fixed yet, and not even having its distribution stopped. Now Media Player is being depreciated.
Is this yet another attempt to force people to switch to Windows 10?
So does this mean that Windows Media Audio (WMA) will not actually replace MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and my personal favorite Opus as the de facto standard lossy music compression codec? And does this also mean that Windows Media Video (WMV) will not replace the almost/never-defunct Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, and HTML5 for streaming video on the web? Will WMV never replace DVD and later Blu-ray discs on home video players (which themselves also seem to have been largely replaced by streaming services, which likely also do not use WMV codecs)?
Microsoft's dreams of repeating its desktop operating system near-monopoly with audio and video distribution near-monopolies appear to be officially dead.
To me this sounds like an improvement. It surely isnt what i associate with the source of the change.