Microsoft defending media player in court

[Vincent]

BBC

A European judge is hearing arguments as to whether Microsoft should be forced to remove its music and video player from its Windows system.

Now for the defence:

Microsoft has countered that both parts of the ruling would do it irretrievable harm.

:roflmao:

Linda Averett of Microsoft told the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg on Friday that many websites and software products would not work without the Windows Media Player.

She said that without the player, customers who buy computers with Windows "are very likely to feel deceived when they find that websites don't work".

"This is a serious problem," added Ms Averett.

:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:

I don't know anybody who uses wmp at all :lol:

[poweramiga2002]

installing widows on your machine does irretrievable harm

he he he

[blobrana]

Hum,
IMHO, out of all the `free` players out there, i`ve got to admit realplayer has to be the worst; with M$ player 10 now being reasonable to use...(untill the mp3 viruses strike).

I can just see the headlines next month:
"Tragic accident kills Media-Player"

[stick with winamp5]

[Vincent]

blobrana wrote:
"Tragic accident kills Media-Player"

Nothing tragic about that "accident" :-D

[stick with winamp5]

Already do, 5.04 is the boss :-D

[Jettah]

poweramiga2002 wrote:
installing widows on your machine does irretrievable harm

and mostly done out of free will...

people tend to massochism!

But do you install WIDOWS on your machine? You pervert!

Jettah

> I don't know anybody who uses wmp at all

now you know at least one, and for me, it works quite well.

[bloodline]

Wayne wrote:
> I don't know anybody who uses wmp at all

now you know at least one, and for me, it works quite well.

I refused to use Media player, until I got my PDA... I tend to only use Media player on that :-)

[Holley]

There's an open source codec project for media player 7, that works nicely.  As usual MS are talking out of their money hole ...

[adolescent]

I use WMP almost exclusively.  Except for viewing QuickTimes with obscure codecs not supported in WMP.

[DonnyEMU]

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..

[FastRobPlus]

I think even if a court decrees that Media Player must be removed from the OS, Amiga users will not be affected.  

I for one would love to have Media Player on my machine! Or anything!  How come Media Player could play compressed AVI files, MP3 files, and VCD files on a 66MHz 486 PC 8 or more years ago, but Amiga stil cannot do this on a 66MHz processor.  I would have thought that there would be wizards out there demonstrating how to get a stock 500 playing MP3s with less than 10% CPU utilization.  
Those kinds of amazing feats are what the Amiga was all about.  I would think there would be an elegant media player of some kind supporting at least 2.04 68020 Amigas.

Can somebody point one out to me?  I seriously want to use one of these CD-ROM equiped Amigas I have laying around for something.

[seer]

There are alternative codecs for both Quicktime and Real, IIRC RealAlternative and QuicktimeAltenative. Tho I have nothing against Quicktime, I can't stand RealPlayerONE.. Liked RealJukebox tho..