Andy Smith's Blog

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WMP 10

WARNING: RANT AHEAD

So, ya, Windows Media Player 10 is coming out soon. Yawn. Come on Microsoft, add Ogg Vorbis support. The format is completely open. Heck, somebody even already made the directshow filter for ogg. Andy wants tag/media library support. Until then, WMP is fairly useless to so many of us. Guess I’ll use and recommend Winamp instead.

Hey, Media Player team, see how that works? Nullsoft doesn’t mind supporting more than the bare minimum of audio formats, and they get my screen space. All the Device Sync and Store Integration features in the world don’t mean anything if the player isn’t running.

And also, don’t even start thinking about suggesting I convert my oggs to wma. Transcoding from one lossy format to another just isn’t going to happen. One of the big things a media player should do make it completely IRRELEVANT what format the media is in. Hey, I can understand it if there’s a patent or licensing issue, but completely ignoring an open format for so long... it smells... either crappy political games... or the team just doesn’t care about making the most useful app because theirs already comes with Windows. Either way, the users lose.

Posted: Jun 03 2004, 03:32 AM by Andy Smith | with 3 comment(s)
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Comments

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson said:

Ok. Microsoft not supporting Ogg isn't good but a little bit understandable since they have a whole lot of money invested in WMA and WMV, but what surprises me more is why the Ogg guys themselves or someone from the "the oh so great" Open Source community hasn't yet created a decent Ogg plugin themselves, let alone an encoder. The SDK's are out (Windows Media Player SDK, Windows Media Format SDK etc..) there but still no-one seems to write any of these much requested (and needed?) plugins for WMP (Ogg encoding plugin, LAME MP3 encoding plugin etc..)!

Microsoft are certainly making it possible, so why hasn't anyone seized the opportunity yet, since MS doesn't seem to want to?

On a side note i think WMP10 is a fine upgrade of WMP9. Much nicer looking (yes i do give a damn about how it looks), much improved media library and organizer and i'm looking forward to being able to use the synch stuff when i get myself a good portable player. Now only i'f they'd take a small hit for all of us and license a good DVD playing engine instead of relying on third-party plugins for playing DVD's.
# June 3, 2004 6:23 AM

Oli said:

I'm with you on the DVD front. I just can't understand how every other format in the world is pretty much free to play except DVD's. I mean, you don't need to buy a plugin to play music cd's now do you? Am I missing the point here? Why isn't there an open-source DVD player, now that's the question!!!

WMP has a few glitches but it's getting better. Am about to try 10!
# July 1, 2004 11:08 AM

inner funk said:

the dvd thing is quite lame, and the same goes for ogg, the only possible reason i can see for them not supporting ogg format is the portable sync deal. lots of those dont work with ogg, and if WMP is going for integration with that then oggs wouldnt fit the theme... but still useing a third party plugin to play them? and a shitty one at that... they havent made any progress since 9 as far as i can see on the ogg front, you can still play them, but only one at a time... what a joke. has anyone had a problem with it refusing to close? this happend a few times to me with 9 too, it would leave itself running as a process, music still playing and everything.. well i still use it, my ogg files just get neglected. i do like the new look.. but i think that it looks to good, i mean it dosent work that well, it shouldnt look that good, i made it pink, it fits.
# July 11, 2004 7:54 PM
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