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Windows Media Player 11 Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:38 PM
from the progress-without-forward-progress dept.
Microsoft IT
filenavigator writes "Microsoft issued a press release today publicizing the release of Windows Media Player 11. Looks like the major updates in this version are for the Microsoft marketing engine. Features boasted by Microsoft include better integration with media players sanctioned by them, and integration with their new URGE music service. Additionally, and more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software. Interested parties can download a free copy"
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Windows Media Player 11 Released 50 Comments More /

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  • Can't we wait? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mingot (665080) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:39PM (#16652937)
    Hey, can we wait until the comments before the anti-MS vitrol and fud? Does it have to start right in the article itself? Sheesh.

    • Re:Can't we wait? (Score:5, Funny)

      by 0racle (667029) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:42PM (#16652953)
      Some of us are busy people, we have to get right to the bashing.
    • That was Submitter's point. The "features" that MS gets so excited about (i.e. stock will rise) are the same that make vomit rise in the throats of Slashdotters.

      As for me WMP9 is more than enough.

      • As for me WMP9 is more than enough.

        Same here, but I don't have a choice; I'm still using Win 2000. Guess I'm just old fashioned.

          • This still does not make any sense. Can users still play non-drm'd music, such as: music taken off of bt, music from allofmp3.com, and music ripped from cds? If so, what have they accomplished? The only thing wmp11 does differently is that is allows users to play new kinds of drm music. So how does wmp11 have a tighter grip on windows users?

            Plus, how does Microsoft's stock rise from this? Do they own a record label I don't know about? I really don't see how allowing to play new forms of drm music in

    • Re:Can't we wait? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dahamma (304068) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:12AM (#16653683)
      Yeah, it's amazing. Everyone raves about iPod/iTunes but WMP is EVIL!!

      better integration with media players sanctioned by them

      iPod vs 100+ WMA devices...

      integration with their new URGE music service

      iTunes Store vs URGE...

      more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software

      Fairplay vs WMDRM... one is supported on dozens of devices, the other on 2 (oh, don't forget the crippled Razr, 3!)

      Hey, I have an iPod, but why shouldn't Microsoft be able to add the same "features" Apple has to their media player? (they do that with so many other parts of their OS ;)

      • Re:Can't we wait? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tim C (15259) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @03:11AM (#16654565)
        It's not what's said, it's how it's said. The same could be said for iTunes, which only integrates with iPods, only integrates with iTMS, also supports DRM (and one that Apple has so far refused to licence to anyone else, I might add), and can be downloaded for free.

        You'd never see it said that way, however. The whole tone of the submission is anti-WMP and anti-MS, in stark contrast to how a new version of iTunes would be reported.

        Just because something is true doesn't mean it isn't FUD; it's all in the delivery.

          • Re:Can't we wait? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Tim C (15259) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @04:56AM (#16655093)
            So the article is also FUD; my point still stands. Slashdot wouldn't post a description of iTunes like this, and if a similarly-worded article was posted, the summary wouldn't be written like that.

            It's still FUD, even if it is a quote and directed at someone/something we all hate.
  • Additionally, and more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software. Interested parties can download a free copy"

    You're saying it like DRM is a feature.

    • Digital restrictions management is a feature for residential end users only because it is a feature for the publishers: it makes publishers more likely to consider publishing works in the format.

    • On the contrary. I think he was banking on us all knowing exactly how much DRM sucks (doubly so when it doesn't even work right [flickr.com] ): and highlighting it in such a manner was a bit of subtle irony.

      Weep with me now for the funeral of subtlety.

  • Apt (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jello B. (950817) <jellobmello.gmail@com> on Monday October 30 2006, @10:42PM (#16652959) Homepage
    I tried apt, but it didn't work. Does anybody have the source packages so I can compile it myself?
  • The big problem is that all the videos that I'm interested in are already uploaded to YouTube.

    All the audio I'm interested in is uploaded to BitTorrent.

    I prefer to live offline, away from my computer, so all the slickness in the world doesn't mean squat when I'm not going to be sitting in front of the monitor anyway.

  • ?New? features (Score:5, Funny)

    by nighty5 (615965) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:45PM (#16652983)
    Features boasted by Microsoft include better integration with media players sanctioned by them

    I think these guys have got this one covered: http://www.apple.com/itunes/ [apple.com]
  • "Interested parties can download a free copy" Richard Stallman has a word to say to the submitter.
    • "Interested parties can download a free copy" Richard Stallman has a word to say to the submitter.
      "Shave me" is actually two words, silly!

  • Slashdot 'em! Quick! (Score:5, Funny)

    by carlmenezes (204187) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:50PM (#16653015) Homepage
    Save the world from WMP 11.

  • What's with the GUI? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Frogbert (589961) <frogbert.gmail@com> on Monday October 30 2006, @10:50PM (#16653017)
    Can someone tell me what the deal is with WMP's GUI? I noticed around WMP 7 that they started breaking every Windows convention in the book. I stuck with Mplayer2 for a long time until I discovered Media player classic. Has the GUI improved? Does it blend in well with Vista's way of doing things and that's why its different? Or is it just poorly designed and confusingly implemented like I expect it is?

    • Re:What's with the GUI? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by XoXus (12014) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:54PM (#16653065)
      I guess they're doing much the same thing that Apple did with iTunes on Mac OS X. It blends in, but it's full of widgets that simply aren't found anywhere in any other application.
    • I wouldn't complain about that. There are a lot of examples of applications on other OSes that don't use standard controls to build their interface. Besides, I like UIs that at least look interesting. This is the reason that I'm still using Winamp instead of Foobar2000.
      • there are ways of making foobar look very interesting, you can move controls around and change what information is displayed, and how.
        foobar looks very simple but is probably one of the most moddable music players out there
    • Agreed - it took me several dozen seconds to figure out how to play a CD I'd inserted via WMP. Then another 60 or so to figure out how to get rid of the visualization and make it a smaller profile player.

  • Controls as bad as WMP 10? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quokkapox (847798) <quokkapox@gmail.com> on Monday October 30 2006, @10:50PM (#16653019)
    If it's as bad as Windows Media Player 10, don't bother. What kind of crappy media player doesn't allow you to jump back and forth in the video/audio with keyboard controls? Whose stupid idea was it to make pause be CTRL-P? VLC's controls are the best, you can zip around with CTRL, ALT, or SHIFT- arrow keys to skip one minute, ten seconds, or one second respectively. Plus the space bar pauses and resumes.

    Or maybe you'd rather try to slide a tiny dark slider along a tiny dark track and skip around that way.

    Didn't *anyone* at microsoft take an HCI class in college?

    • Re:Controls as bad as WMP 10? (Score:5, Funny)

      by nighty5 (615965) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:04PM (#16653167)
      VLC's controls are the best, you can zip around with CTRL, ALT, or SHIFT- arrow keys to skip one minute, ten seconds, or ....

      It must of been created for users that only have one free hand available - watching porno comes to mind.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jZnat (793348) *
        In that case, MPlayer takes the cake with its usage of right/left arrows, up/down arrows, and page up/down for skipping 10 seconds, 1 minute (or something like that), and 10 minutes respectively.

  • Priorities (Score:3, Interesting)

    by debilo (612116) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `zegehs'> on Monday October 30 2006, @10:56PM (#16653077)
    So I have to go through an annoying and possibly bogus WGA check and pray it doesn't result in a false positive if I want to download Windows Defender, you know, a security tool, but I they impose no such checks if I want to download a simple DRM-infested media player? Nice priorities there, Microsoft.
      • You don't have to validate in order to download, but it does require it once you start the install.
        I refuse to install it, so I wouldn't know, but thanks for the info. It's interesting to see how serious they take their *GA checks, what with WGA and soon OGA, and even having to validate for unimportant apps. I wonder where this will lead to.
  • I might install it just to keep things up-to-date with the WMV support. I use Media Player Classic and VLC for most videos anyway, but I still installed previous versions of WMP so that the codecs it installed were complete, and I assume this will have newer codec versions too.

    In other words, it's a back-end update for me. It sure as shit doesn't have the functionality/ease of use that something like MPC has.

    • DON'T Get it for codecs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RareButSeriousSideEf (968810) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:39AM (#16653889) Homepage Journal
      Not only should you not get WMP11 intentionally, the fact that there's a RTM for it should make you think about turning off Windows Update (if you haven't already). At least make sure you have a disk-image backup before installing it, or you'll probably be kicking yourself down the road.

      From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/play er/11/readme.aspx [microsoft.com]:
      "Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses)."
      "Digital media files must be in stored in monitored folders for media sharing to work properly in Windows Media Player 11."
      "Content that is protected with media usage rights cannot be played in Windows Media Player 10 if a computer already has the Windows Media Format 11 Runtime installed."

      The following issue from the Beta release isn't mentioned in the official release notes, but the fact that it appeared in the beta indicates that MS was preparing their DRM platform for a new time-limit "feature" that can be applied to recorded TV on their Media Center products (at the request of broadcasters, of course):
      "Recorded TV shows that are protected with media usage rights, such as some TV content recorded on premium channels, will not play back after 3 days when Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows XP is installed on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time."

      At time of posting, this could still be found at:
      http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Eah4zybQy4sJ:w ww.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/re adme.aspx [72.14.203.104]

      I'm not pulling that speculation out of my butt, either. They already add more restrictions to DVD playback than any other software or consumer DVD player does. DVD playback is prohibitied in Media Center Edition when your display device is set to > 640 x 480 resolution (as is the case for HDTV use):
      http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323 [microsoft.com]

      Even today, as of Rollup 2, Media Center Edition renders recorded TV unplayable after two weeks when the broadcaster requests it:
      http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/rss.aspx?ForumID= 49&PostID=144193 [thegreenbutton.com]

      I would be extremely surprised if down the road a bit we don't discover that WMP11 is a trojan horse for a slew of previously unheard of content restrictions.

      By day I'm a developer on the Microsoft platform. By night I'm an XP Media Center Edition user who's scared & angry enough to invest research time I don't have into MythTV & [Ubuntu || Mandriva || Fedora]. As far as home usage goes, I'm sorry, but this former Redmond fanboy / apologist is done with MS.

  • OK, but ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rlp (11898) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:56PM (#16653091)
    I'll wait for the Linux version.
  • From TFA:
    Does anyone out there know of a media player that just plays MP3s, and Wav files without in-your-face advertising for the media companies?

    Its a fair question. Does anyone know of a simple player
    that just plays the music and gets the heck out of the way.
    It just keeps a list of your MP3s and will play and then minimise?

    And for you apple fanboys, itunes is no better than WMP in this regard.
    • It's a fair question. Does anyone know of a simple player
      that just plays the music and gets the heck out of the way.
      It just keeps a list of your MP3s and will play and then minimise?
      For Windows: Winamp
      For Linux: XMMS

      Sure, there's stuff out there like Amarok, SnackAmp, and whatnot. But the two I mentioned are by far the best at just playing music, storing playlists, and staying the hell out of the way.
    • winamp 2.91 for audio
      MediaPlayer Classic for Video
      can't really think of any other products needed.
      query: does the WMP11 break your recorded videos after 2 days, like the beta did?

    • Freeamp (Score:5, Informative)

      by Animats (122034) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:34PM (#16653425) Homepage

      Freeamp, which is now called Zinf [zinf.org] due to complaints from the Winamp people, is what you want. No ads. No phoning home. No DRM. No nonsense. Open source. Runs on Windows and Linux.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bacon Bits (926911)

      Foobar 2000 [foobar2000.org]

      It's FOSS, so the GUI is generally crap (it's as unitiuitive as other media players while still being ugly and unskinnable by default) but it's very lightweight and unobtrusive. It's been in development a long time and is quite mature.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by trezor (555230)

      I've found foobar2000 [foobar2000.org] to be very nice. It's a typical hacker-player that can be mod'ed to do anything you want it to, but the base is just a simple, lightweight music player with a library, superb format-support (except iTunes MPEG4 lossless) and otherwise no fuzz.

      I ditched Winamp5 for Foobar when I saw Winamp using 200MBs+ of RAM with my current music-library. Plus Winamp is shit and doesn't support unicode.

  • Is syncing fixed? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mike_K (138858) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:19PM (#16653289)
    I have a Sandisk Sansa e270. For some reason, I just don't want to buy an iPod Nano. Guess I'm just cheap? This is the next best thing - 6gb of flash, small, similar interface, half the price.

    I used to use WMP10 to sync my files. It wasn't the most convenient method, but it beat doing the sync by turning the Sansa into a USB drive (it reboots forever, updating some databases). Selecting which files to sync up was fairly simple, and the syncing was fast. The biggest complaint I had was that it didn't really understand the concept of syncing on multiple computers (home and office). One has to become the main computer and the other... I dunno.

    I installed the WMP11 beta, because I was hoping that that part of syncing would have been fixed. Well, I regret that decision now. Luckily, I'm going to reinstall this computer soon anyway.

    Basically, syncing is incredibly slow now, the interface much less intuitive and for some reason it keeps uploading copies of the same files. I gave up on getting that sync right. I'm downloading the final version, I'll install it probably tomorrow.

    m
  • What's up with the made up terms like 'Reverse sync', 'gas gauge', 'visual navigation' to describe what are very basic features.

    Should we start applying them to general computer use too?

    'Hey Bob, I need you to reverse sync that report to my computer, so you don't run out of gas, check the gas gauge, and you'll receive a great sync experience.'

  • Winamp? Hello? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NineNine (235196) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:22PM (#16653315) Homepage
    Sorry, but I think that the PC media player was perfected win Winamp 2.8. Literally. I think it's about as easy to use and powerful as you can ever get. iTunes is impossibly bloated and buggy. Windows Media Player is the most confusing interface I could ever imagine. Winamp is tiny, very powerful (if you want it to be), and *very* easy to use. I don't care how many shiny buttons MS MP and ITunes add, they both just get continueally worse with every version (and admittedly, so did the early Winamp 5.x versions). And really, how many different possible ways do you need to play music? How many iterations of "play" ans "stop" can there possibly be?

  • WMP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JustNiz (692889) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:32PM (#16653405)
    Why is it microsoft can't make a gui that doesn't take more screen space than the actual content?

  • .ogg anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga (793279) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:03AM (#16653631)
    Can anyone tell me whether this new version will play .ogg files by default? If not where can one grab a plug-in? Thanx.

  • Dear God, what have they done... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Crabbyass (867531) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:14AM (#16654059)
    I consider myself pretty adept at figuring out things for myself, especially when it comes to new software, especially when it comes to audio software. After a short ammount of time, I have been able to get advanced, professional audio programs up and running (mind you, on a basic level), even with such daunting software as Pro Tools, Cubase, Sibelius, Finale, etc.

    So I downloaded WMP11, and I suddenly found myself staring at the screen, not having a friggin' clue where to even begin. It was literally the first time I felt like I had been stumped by a seemingly simplistic piece of software. Yes, there were all sorts of pretty buttons, some of which I REEEEEEEALY wanted to press - but all I actually wanted to do was play some fucking Zeppelin. Clicking on those fancy buttons only made things worse...I got lost and actually gave up. This has to be the worst GUI I have ever seen. I can't WAIT for my father to download this, a man who has to be reminded every time he touches the remote to press the CBL button, or he'll change the channel on the TV rather than the Cable Box.

    It brought back a memory I thought I had repressed, when after almost 20 years of piano training, I began playing the organ which includes a four-octave keyboard to be played by your feet. I felt like a 5 year old all over again, my co-ordination just vanishing. My ego took a huge beating then, and it's taken another one just now.

    I stick with iTunes because I like the "browser", which filters the songs by Genre, then Artist, then album. Yes, I know it's bloated, but I've managed to forgive them for that. Meanwhile, I found JetAudio to be a pretty good plyaer, and am downloading Media Player Classic as I type.

    I'm still searching for the one player that "gets it right". Any more ideas? Send'em my way...

  • Is it just me? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Qbertino (265505) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @02:50AM (#16654437)
    Is it just me or do other people also consider the WMP one of the shittiest pieces of Bundleware we still have to put up with? A bloated memory and performance hog, long outrun by it's free and shareware equivalents, a relic of the nineties with features bolted on left, right and center and a performance as bad as ever, despite computer power having increased ten-fold since back in the days.
    WinAmp and VLC could do things years ago that this sorry excuse of 'convienienceware' will ever be able to do. No?

  • Xbox 360 video streaming (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bob[Bob] (60151) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:35AM (#16655985) Journal
    WMP11 does have at least one useful feature, which is that it will stream video to an Xbox 360... up till now you'd need to have a Windows Media Centre to do this.
    • I'm currently using a beta of WMP11 on Windows Vista RC2. I've got the artist view open, which has lots of album art shown, I'm playing a song, and paging around the library. It is using less than 13 megs of ram. When I minimize WMP 11, the ram usage immediately drops to under 6 megs of ram.

      That's a half of a percent of my available ram... and my machine is getting dated.

      Can you really not spare it?
    • MPEG-4 is just as standard and cross-platform as MPEG-1 was. Blame Microsoft for not supporting it because they want you to use the hilarious "WMV" format for everything.

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