Broadbandindia Magazine

Windows Media Player (WMP) is a proprietary digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. Editions of Windows Media Player were also released for Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris but development of these has since been discontinued.

In addition to being a media player, WMP includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to compact discs, burn recordable discs in Audio CD format or as data discs with playlists such as an MP3 CD, synchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enable users to purchase or rent music from a number of online music stores. WMP replaced an earlier application called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback.

WMP 12

Windows Media Player 12 is the most recent version of Windows Media Player as of July 2009. It was released in July 22, 2009 along with Windows 7 and has not been released for previous versions of Windows. WMP 11 is available for Windows XP and included in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The default file formats are Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Systems Format (ASF), and supports its own XML based playlist format called Windows Playlist (WPL). The player is also able to utilize a digital rights management service in the form of Windows Media DRM. WMP 12, developed by Microsoft, is the release of Windows Media Player superseding WMP 11. It was first introduced in October 2008 at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference and has been released as part of the Windows 7 operating system and has not been released for previous versions of Windows.

New attraction

WMP 12 adds native support for H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 2 video formats, AAC audio and 3GP, MP4 and MOV container formats. Microsoft has recognized AVCHD as one of the popular implementations of H.264 encoding scheme, and has file extensions M2TS and MTS pre-registered in the system. WMP is able to index content of these files, while Windows Explorer is capable of creating thumbnails for each clip.

The user interface has been redesigned such that the Now Playing view plays media in a separate minimalist window with floating playback controls, and also gives access to the current playlist, visualizations, and enhancements. Enhancements are housed in individual undocked windows. The library view includes the rest of the media management functions. It also can preview songs from the library when users hover over the media file and click the Preview button. WMP 12  uses Windows 7’s libraries instead of its proprietary library database format and can play unprotected songs from the iTunes library. The taskbar-integrated Mini-player has been replaced with controls in the taskbar’s interactive thumbnail preview (called the Thumbnail Toolbar), albeit minus the volume control function, track and album information shown whenever a new song is played and the progress bar. The taskbar icon also supports jump lists introduced in Windows 7.

How it Works ?

WMP 12 helps plays more music and video in an intuitive, easy-touse interface to play digital media files, organize your digital media collection, burn CDs of your favorite music, rip music from CDs, sync digital media files to a portable device, and shop for digital media content from online stores. It even displays songs visually using thumbnails of associated album cover artwork. This gives you a much easier reference when browsing through artists, nusic, albums, and videos in the library.

The versatile WMP 12 has built-in support for many popular audio and video formats — including 3GP, AAC, AVCHD, MPEG-4, WMV, and WMA. It also supports most AVI, DivX, MOV, and Xvid files. The new Now Playing mode shows only the controls you need, so nothing comes between you and your music or video. A new taskbar thumbnail with playback controls makes previewing easier and fun. Now you can enjoy smarter DVD playback with 15-sec previews, and Jump Lists for fast access to favorite media. To start Windows Media Player 12, click Start, All Programs, and then click Windows Media Player. Or, type media player in the Instant Search box.

How to Use ?

Instantly, the WMP started converting the CD to his favorite WMA format and to his delight even automatically downloaded the album art from an online database. He was amazed to find out that in case the WMP can’t find a match, he can use Bing search to add customized album art. When anyone wanted to stream music and video to other PCs running Windows 7 or compatible devices around the home, he could do so effortlessly with the amazing ‘Play To’ feature. The ‘Remote Media Streaming’ feature was a real delight as it allowed him to enjoy music or videos on his home PC even from the road. Are you also yearning for a more fun- filled and personalized digital music experience? Like anyone, all you need to do is click open the all new WMP 12 in Windows 7 and enjoy your music and video like never before.

Media streaming

While previous versions streamed media to UPnP compliant devices (Digital Media Server role) and could play media by fetching it from a network share (Digital Media Player role), WMP 12 can access media from the shared media libraries on the network or Home Group, stream media to DLNA 1.5 compliant devices and allows itself (once the remote control option is turned on) to be remotely controlled by Digital Media Controller devices which stream media (Digital Media Renderer role). Similarly, the Play To feature once enabled for remote PCs, by turning on remote control of the player, allows compliant devices and computers to be discovered and controlled remotely from a computer running WMP 12 (Digital Media Controller role). If the devices do not support the streamed format, WMP 12 transcodes the format on-the-fly. Media from a home network can also be streamed over the internet using an Online ID Provider service, which handles discovery of the computer’s IP address, authorization, security, connectivity and Quality of Service issues.

Removed features

• Windows Media Player’s taskbar-integrated Mini-player has been removed. The thumbnail preview which replaces this lacks volume control and a progress bar. The ability to start the miniplayer only for certain files based on specific text in their file names was also removed.
• The Advanced Tag Editor (ID3 tag editor), which allowed users to edit metadata for media files file, is removed. Editing metadata in WMP library by right clicking and in Details pane of Windows Explorer is still supported, however not all metadata fields are exposed unlike the Advanced Tag Editor.
• The “Party Mode”, “Color Chooser” and “Media Link for E-mail”, features present in previous versions of WMP, have been removed in version 12.
• The context menu entry “Find In Library” which allowed locating the Now Playing song in the WMP library was removed. The context menu command “Open file location” can be used to locate the song in the Windows 7 Music library.
• The option to adjust the bit rate when burning data CDs has been removed.
• The options to use the overlay mixer, video mixing renderer (VMR-7) or high quality mode (VMR-9) has been removed.
• Enhancements are only accessible from Now Playing view in a floating window. They do not dock to the Now Playing window, and do not get restored when WMP is restarted. Even when manually restored, their position does not get saved.
• The option to add previously deleted files to the library when re-adding files has been removed.
• Several player preferences are not saved and restored upon restarting the player. The playlist pane in Now Playing view is not shown automatically unlike previous versions. Enhancements do not get restored when Windows Media Player is restarted. Even when manually restored, the previous position of the Now Playing window and enhancements is not retained.

Born and brought up

Microsoft Windows has had a media player since 1991, when Windows 3.0 with MultiMedia Extensions was released. This version of Windows, which was included with “Multimedia PC”-compatible machines but not available for retail sale, included the Media Player application, was capable of playing .mmm animation files, and could be extended to support other formats. It used MCI to handle media files. In November of the following year, Video for Windows was introduced with the ability to play digital video files in an AVI container format, with codec support for RLE and Video1, and support for playing uncompressed files. Indeo 3.2 was added in a later release. Video for Windows was first available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, and later integrated into Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.

In 1996 Microsoft released ActiveMovie, a replacement for Video for Windows that incorporates a new way of dealing with media files, and adds support for streaming media (which the original Media Player couldn’t handle). ActiveMovie was renamed to DirectShow in 1996, and a new Media Player was created, known internally as Media Player 2.

All versions branded WMP (instead of simply Media Player) support DirectShow codecs. Version 6.4 was included with Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but was dropped in Windows Vista. WMP version 7 was a large revamp, first included with Windows Me with a new user interface, visualizations and increased functionality. Beginning with Windows Vista, WMP supports the Media Foundation framework besides DirectShow; as such it plays certain types of media using Media Foundation as well as some types of media using DirectShow.