The problem I have with all of this is that windows media player has always been in the system since Windows 3.1. It didn't have fancy skins or digital rights management and a long time ago I think you could actually save out media files being played by it.
Multimedia PC developers know that MCI (the media control interface) has been there since the 16-bit windows days. Detaching media player and calling it an extra feature just shows how the legal community doesn't realize how integrated this is into the OS..
Why is this being asked to be done? Well Microsoft leveraged the component by bringing advertising into it. You didn't see the court going after Apple's quicktime player in MacOS or the one built into BeOS.. Well why Microsoft's? It's certainly has to do with popularity and nothing else. It's not uncompetitive that it's there. In fact RealPlayer and the Real folks have quite a bit of ex-microsoft engineers who worked on windows media player working for them.
If you want another media player no one has ever said you can't install one. People are forgetting history here..
