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.
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.
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.
So, what, they can make a shitty web app that will have less features than WMP.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Why use something with an acronym of "WiMP" when VLC and other good options exist?
but you can turn off the automatic install of them, and decline to install the one that has this "feature" in it. since it's not 'security' related, it better not be in the monthly 'security only' updates and only in the 'security and quality' rollups... pretty piss-poor comprehension of 'security' or 'quality' either way.
this is a total shit move on microsoft's part. windows 8.1 has nearly four years left in its lifecycle... especially if windows 10's media player retains the feature...... or are they going to delete the 'legacy' media player outright on it (because their spyshit on 10 shows 'too many' people use it instead of the fucking 'apps')?
The issue isn't an update that removed features. The issue is Microsoft turning off a cloud server that provides this data to Windows 7/8/8.1 versions of WiMP. You'd need to patch WiMP to get the data from somewhere else if you need it.
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.
More than likely that they want to kill WMP
Good riddance but what they replace it with will prolly be shitter than WMP.
Prolly worse than RealPlayer. Who remembers that mess.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
One less server tracking your viewing habits?
Good riddance!
No sig today...
Nobody asked you. Not all PCs are actual personal computers. Some of them are essentially cogs in a larger apparatus. If a machine has a small proscribed role , there is no need to apply patches unless you find an actual hole that affects your use-case.
Good-bye
This is like a car manufacturer saying "since your car is 10 years old we're going to retire the taillights."
#LearnToCode and write your own!
Careful there, that'll get you banned for hate speech on twitter.
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
Automatic updates has absolutely nothing to do with this. The service in question is just that, a service, not a piece of software. Think of it as Microsoft's version of the CDDB database. They're shutting down servers. Any metadata content for your CDs that is already downloaded locally will continue to function just fine locally. Only "new" content, such as attempting to load a new CD into Windows Media Player will fail to obtain the metadata because the metadata database service online is being shut down. These articles are just FUD tactics per usual about the end of days!
"This change doesn’t affect any major media player functionality such as playback, navigating collections, media streaming, and so forth. Only secondary features that require downloading of new metadata are potentially affected. Windows 10 is not affected. This change is effective immediately."
Well I'd finally blocked the memory until you reminded me o_O
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Speaking of Win 7 and Win 10, when is Microsoft going to bring out a good desktop OS?
In related news, I see that the forecast for tomorrow night is for Hell freezing over (actual temperature -35f locally and the high for Wednesday -21f )
New metadata for music, TV shows and movies, will not be added to Windows Media Player.
Will anyone even notice? I mean, apart from 80-year-olds who don't know that anything exists outside of MSIE, WMP, and Notepad, who actually uses WMP for anything?
No it isn't. Updates don't protect you from anything and if you think otherwise, then you don't understand computer security.
As far as Windows 7 goes, does it even work? I thought support for Windows 7 has already ended.
Reading the description, it looks like a deliberate downgrade, since Windows Media Player is not the media player of choice on Windows 10: that role has been split b/w Groove and Movies. (A pretty stupid move, since Groove can't play music videos, while Movies can't distinguish b/w movies and video clips I take on the iPhone of the kids.) So there really was no reason to touch WMP: just leave it alone, and let Windows 7 users keep using it.
While I'm on 10, I'm planning to leave once Microsoft goes Windows 365. Already, I'm on TrueOS for most things, and just use my Windows 10 laptop for things that have to have Windows, like that Cisco Packet Tracer simulator (which I haven't so far figured out how to get on FreeBSD). But other than that, Windows 10 is genuine garbage, unlike most versions upto Windows 7. I might move to a Mac if I can afford it
New metadata for music, TV shows and movies, will not be added to Windows Media Player.
Will anyone even notice? I mean, apart from 80-year-olds who don't know that anything exists outside of MSIE, WMP, and Notepad, who actually uses WMP for anything?
WMP is the best music management software for automatic playlists. You can create playlists based on the metadata, file location, file name, etc. I have a WMP add-on that allows me to sync my music collection to my iPod classic, including my playlists. However, most people have moved on to streaming instead of buying music, so it makes sense that Microsoft would drop this.
As for removing the metadata updates, that's annoying but not a big deal for me. Most of that can be entered manually anyway and artwork can be dragged and dropped on to the album.
But yeah, the flavor of the day is to rent music and movies. When the apocalypse happens, at least I'll have tunes...