Windows 7 beefs up multimedia

WMP 11 and older had two glaring problems, to my mind...

1. It couldn't natively play anything that's actually used in the real world - not in Microsoft's fantasy land. This includes DVDs, for God's sake.

2. It was clunky and prone to crashing.

WMP 12 appears to have fixes those two issues, largely. Finally... Windows can play most normal formats and codecs out of the box. WMP 12 is a massive leap forward for Windows multimedia.
 
and it streams to the XBOX perfectly, no need for TVersity any more :)

correct.I stream via the ps3 perfectly and easy to.The server is automatically activated when you allow streaming and sharing.Its great but i also run ps3server,so 2 servers run at once .SOmetimes you do get the odd dns server error:D
 
I hated wmp more than anyone i ever met, but in windows 7 they did it perfectly. Love the minimalistic approach they took to it, when you play your video thats really all there is in the screen making playing your series on the one side of the screen while browsing the web on the other side actually fun.
 
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The Windows Media Centre in my 7100 RC does not allow me to add photos to a library while playing music.

WTF?

"Media playback needs to be stopped to perform this action- are you sure you want to continue?" NO- I'll now just use Winamp and VLC, just as I always have.

The show pictures while music is playing thing also sucks. Though I have a few hundred Widewcreen wallpapers I'd like it to scroll through, it shows the same 15 over and over...

Perhaps the final version has these "fetures" fixed...
 
Windows 7 beefs up multimedia

One of the major areas of improvement in Windows 7 is its multimedia handling

bring it on!!! :D

WMP 11 and older had two glaring problems, to my mind...

1. It couldn't natively play anything that's actually used in the real world - not in Microsoft's fantasy land. This includes DVDs, for God's sake.

2. It was clunky and prone to crashing.

WMP 12 appears to have fixes those two issues, largely. Finally... Windows can play most normal formats and codecs out of the box. WMP 12 is a massive leap forward for Windows multimedia.

must say I almost exclusively use WMP 11 for music and DVD's off my laptop and its been stable and great. got to download lastest codecs but its generally a good program... me thinks, anyway. :)
 
@general koffi - that waits to be seen... dvd playback was disabled on vista business, but enabled on home and ultimate. not sure how they'll split windows 7 distros.

i haven't noticed much improvement on wmp12... was expecting something revolutionary. but then i'm really fussy when it comes to media players. i haven't found one that can do everything nicely yet. wmp12 lacks the apple genius / scrobbling feature, i can't find advanced tag editor and they finally support codecs that should have been supported in wmp11. now please add flv playback (i'm sure they'd get sued if they tried supporting rm or mov). why on earth did they kill the equaliser (or hide it where nobody could find it)? and maybe, just maybe, they could throw a decent transcoder in there. i'm tired of sucky freeware transcoders.

the one thing i DO really like though are the taskbar media buttons, winner.

sorry, when the thread said "beefing up multimedia", i thought it was talking about native software that would compete with apple's imovie, idvd etc, not just adding a few more codecs to the media player.
 
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We don't have all the facts of what is enabled and disabled and simply missing from the various versions yet.
I want to know for sure what I'm buying.
 
Grab RTM.... run for 30 days (25) and buy license

Oops.. sorry not out yet... Sure google will be your friend ;)
 
and it streams to the XBOX perfectly, no need for TVersity any more :)
My main gripe with TVersity is that, when you add files to your sharing folder, it doesn't update your library in real-time like Windows media sharing did. The closest it comes is specifying a pre-defined amount of time when a refresh should occur, and you can't go lower than an hour.
 
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