KB4046355 Deletes Windows Media Player in Windows 10 Build 16299
winaero.com
winaero.com
To paraphrase loosely someone else's memorable quote (unfortunately I have forgotten the author), "the updates are like vaccinations that also have a large chance of making you grow an extra arm and turning your skin green."
Relatedly, another forced update recently left some of my coworkers using Win10 and IE pissed off about an extra useless search box appearing: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie11-iewindows_...
Most people I know use VLC or Media Player Classic with codec packs. And Foobar or some other player for their music. Though it seems most just use Spotify or Youtube now for music.
Which the author points out: "It is not known if this happens due to a bug or whether Microsoft is removing Windows Media Player by default to promote Store apps like Groove Music."
Which is interesting because Microsoft just caved and finally added Spotify support on their consoles(as they were pushing Grove music).
-- anonymous big music publisher
"Owned" music and offline listening seems to be dying a slow death. In some ways it represents consumer preference -- the vast majority of current music available from any device for the same price as one new album per month is too tempting for most. I do wonder if the days of being able to actually purchase music and movies for a one-time fee will come to an end. Piracy is probably the only force keeping that from already happening with music and physical movie sales in decline.
This is really the only legal way to build your own DVR, isn't it?
The broadcast flag issues? I think those have been resolved in the USA by having the rules that the FCC tried to implement removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_flag
edited to clarify the broadcast flag legislation fixes are USA specific
> I believe it requires Windows Media Play on all playback devices.
So in order to watch all the streams in your house you'd have to use WMP.
VLC, WinAMP2, MPC, iTunes, foobar2000 are all good for one thing or the other. But for playing music files, there is no better program than Windows Media Player 11/12. The combination of XP or Win7 and Media Player is perfect. One can rate mp3 files in Explorer or in Media Player and create playlists based on that using saved searches, etc. And the cool thing all the data is stored to the metadata of the file itself, not like iTunes were all your manual edited that sits in an SQLite db and cannot be recovered or gets lost. WinAMP2 has not the best interface, and no a good rating system, but otherwise it is second best media player for mp3. Then comes iTunes, older iTunes versions had a much better UI.
Best for videos VLC or MPC
Best for music Windows Media Player or WinAMP
Unfortunately, many noobs prefer to stream music nowadays, and then they cry when they loose access to "their library" or "are stuck in airplane mode".
I never use WMP because to me it feels like the poor cousin to iTunes (just a feeling, probably not justified), and iTunes is ineptitude incarnate (justified)
When has a UWP app ever had more features than the Forms app it replaced? I'd love to know. Windows Mail doesn't even properly support attachments let alone do even a quarter of what Outlook does.
The Windows Mail app is the crappy successor to Outlook Express, and Windows Live Mail. They were free (as in beer) and either bundled with the OS or in a free productivity pack.
Outlook is a completely separate beast, usually acquired as part of Microsoft Office or with a premium Exchange-based email service.
Now the default has been replaced with one that takes much longer to start up. Prob for a bunch of features I'll never use.
And they removed the one I actually find useful, which is where it restarts at the top of the list when you reach the last image. =(
God forbid people have useful, compact tool for quick image manipulations! But it competes with 3D Paint so IT HAS TO GO.
That's right. New Windows 10 removes mspaint.
This was super useful for exploring a library and would be more useful for something like Spotify with millions of songs.
Interestingly, this feature is partially implemented on iOS via force touch (or was at some point). Please bring this to desktop. I haven’t used Windows Media Player in years, but that was a killer feature I still miss.
(And it separates the ActiveX stuff from the application too, which I'm happy to hear, applications that use it for decoding now shouldn't require the full WMP install)
iTunes is magical compared to it and that is saying something...
I've spent enough time helping the elderly on computers that changes to see these changes as revealing a deeply problematic arrogance. Drastic, forced changes to basic OS functionality should be illegal (not really, but devs should take it that seriously).
They have just taken away the ability of millions of people to listen to music they've purchased on the computer they own. And don't tell me they'll be able to figure out the Zune app. Sorry, Groove app. They won't because they'll just think their computer is broken when the wrong app starts up when they go to listen to their music.
And then they'll call you and me and ask why it's broken. And I, for one, won't have a good answer for them.
We are past the point in the evolution of major OS's where drastic changes like these are permissible. Or make a Windows version that get security updates and nothing else and make it available to the general public. Car makers don't change the stick shift functionality after you've bought the car (maybe Musk has the ability to do this, but the people who have licensed the right to drive a Tesla deployment are a unique population for now).
And further tangent -- wouldn't it be a cool concept if we could buy car hardware and then license the OS (Tesla/GM/Audi/BMW/etc.) we wanted to run on it separately? Cool as in a security and logistical nightmare, but cool conceptually nonetheless.
Goof in timing? Their pay-to-stream app isn't out yet.
You know that saying about The Cloud? "It's just someone else's computer"?
Well, it's not your computer. It's Microsoft's computer, and they are going to do with it as they please. It's not your computer anymore. That's what happens when the cloud comes to your desktop. It's someone else's computer.
Which could be a problem, since some software depends on media player codecs/libraries for playback - for example vivaldi browser has problems with some types of youtube codecs (with mime reported as AVC/mp4a.40.2 not pure AVC) without the media feature pack, some other video sites also have this problem without it.
Seeing someone who probably had access to use whatever Microsoft software he wanted including Word, OneNote, and whatever else they have, using Notepad, was a bit surprising and relieving.
About that first issue: both Explorer and Notepad, and probably a bunch more, insert a square instead of deleting a word when pressing ctrl+backspace. I just don't understand why Microsoft doesn't fix that kind of bullshit, and instead leave it in for decades. It's the same thing with cmd.exe; instead of improving it, they've left it in the exact same broken state since (probably before, but at least including) Windows XP, and instead of fixing the issues with it, created a whole new shell.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/10/02/micro...