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Software Windows Media Player 11 Leaked
Brandon Hill (Blog) - May 15, 2006 12:32 AM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 36 comment(s) - last by zinger1.. on Jun 14 at 2:36 PM

Image courtesy Softpedia
Here's your chance to play around with WMP11 a few days early

For those of you who don't have access to the latest builds of Windows Vista and want to get a taste of Windows Media Player 11, here's your chance. Windows Media Player 11.0.5358.4826 has leaked and weighs in at 22.9MB. The leaked download is in RAR format. Once extracted, you'll install the WMP11 runtime first, then you'll install the actual application.

For those of you unfamiliar with the new features in Windows Media Player 11, here's a snippet from Paul Thurrott's overview of the application:

Aside from the wonderful visualizations, WMP 11 is improved in many other ways. First of all, it's considerably simpler looking than previous WMP, with a nice tabbed-based navigation scheme across the top of the window. Each of these tabs hides a multitude of context-sensitive additional features, however. When you click the little down-arrow under Library, for example, you'll see various media library-related options, including options for switching the view from music to pictures, video, recorded TV, or other media content (it is called Windows Media Player, after all).

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uhg
By tk109 on 5/15/2006 1:02:23 AM , Rating: 2
I hate when people make it a .rar file. For crying out loud just make it a zip file. Everyone can unzip. I never use winrar and I dont want it on my system for those few obscure moments when someone wants to be different.

Thanks for the link though. I want to give the new player a spin I'll try it out later when it's zipped ;)




RE: uhg
By Xorp on 5/15/2006 1:20:41 AM , Rating: 2
Um, Winzip can only extrat .zip, while Winrar can extra .zip, .rar and much more. Winzip is a terrible and slow program. I don't know anyone who uses it. Winrar is faster and just a much better program.


RE: uhg
By Brandon Hill (blog) on 5/15/2006 1:22:24 AM , Rating: 2
I use 7-Zip. It's freeware and it handles .rar, .zip, .tar, .gz, etc.

No sense in limiting yourself to just one compression format...


RE: uhg
By Xenoid on 5/15/2006 2:06:38 AM , Rating: 2
I use WinAce and it does all of them and .ace files as well ^_^


RE: uhg
By glennpratt on 5/15/06, Rating: 0
RE: uhg
By Griswold on 5/15/2006 8:20:19 AM , Rating: 2
Those who want higher compression rates and speed. ACE is superior to zip and rar in many ways - and it handles all the other types as well. It also has a really nice GUI, something many other tools lack.

And as far as "not free" is concerned. Believe it or not, there are people out there who can afford paying for software.

For the record, I use 7-zip after the long journey from winzip to winrar to winace to 7-zip.


RE: uhg
By timmiser on 5/15/2006 12:53:15 PM , Rating: 2
Winace is just as free as winzip. (They both have pay versions which give you extra stuff)

I use Winace too because sometimes size does matter!


RE: uhg
By Samus on 5/15/2006 2:42:26 PM , Rating: 2
winace and winrar are the only two programs (other than 7-zip, which has a crummy interface) that support multithreading and multiprocessor platforms.

huge performance improvement.


RE: uhg
By puffpio on 5/15/2006 2:11:42 AM , Rating: 3
Maybe YOU never use RAR files, but the majority of file archive transfers are RAR..although everyone is now moving to 7z


RE: uhg
By Nyu on 5/15/2006 4:38:53 AM , Rating: 2
Everyone is "moving to 7z" ? I haven't even heard of that LOL, rar is the real thing to use.

This Media Player 11 is nothing new anyway, you can have it in the latest Vista beta


RE: uhg
By ninjit on 5/15/2006 12:20:04 PM , Rating: 2
The 7-zip program is the beauty. It does everything as mentioned above, including typical unixy archives.
like .tar.gz, or .tar.bz2.

I've tried the .7z (LZMA) compression option, and it's just too much a memory hog for my tastes, plus so few people would be able to decrompess the file.



RE: uhg
By piroroadkill on 5/15/2006 6:14:15 AM , Rating: 1
Very few people are moving to 7zip.

RAR is the most popular, and with very good reason.

Long may WinRAR reign!


RE: uhg
By Griswold on 5/15/2006 8:28:35 AM , Rating: 2
Well, the .7z format offers 9-12% better compression than RAR. The program is also multithreaded (winrar will be SMT aware with v. 3.60 as far as I know) and - OMG - it can unpack RAR as well. I've used winrar for quite some time, but you have to move on if theres something better around.

7-zip for me, thank you.


RE: uhg
By Jellodyne on 5/15/2006 10:00:12 AM , Rating: 2
IZArc does everything. People use rar because it saves bandwidth.


RE: uhg
By Thalyn on 5/15/2006 9:12:17 PM , Rating: 2
This is in response to all the people who posted in reply to the "why RAR?" comment.

Zip is natively supported by WinXP without the use of any programs, and since this is the target audience it makes sense to use it. So it really doesn't matter what other programs support the standard and how fast they may or may not be.


RE: ghu
By Pete84 on 5/16/2006 5:59:09 AM , Rating: 2
.rar is the recognized format of pirates everywhere. Those who propogate data rule the format, right? *laughs* And let me know when you all hit .r99 :-)


screenshots
By Xorp on 5/15/2006 1:15:58 AM , Rating: 4
Here are some screenshots of the Library I took:

http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/001.jpg - artist with lot of albums
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/002.jpg - artists with similar names
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/003.jpg - artist with and without art
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/004.jpg - artists with full album near misc songs from misc arts
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/005.jpg - artist with album near single song
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/006.jpg - artist with album listings - NICE!
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/007.jpg - random weird songs I have listed
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/008.jpg - etc
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/009.jpg - more cool artist albums listing!
http://home.comcast.net/~ericmassara/wmp11/010.gif - more random songs




RE: screenshots
By Xenoid on 5/15/2006 2:09:43 AM , Rating: 2
Does this thing hog CPU bad when you view videos like the current WMP?


RE: screenshots
By Xorp on 5/15/2006 2:29:05 AM , Rating: 2
Uses 16-25 megs when running an Xvid video. I never really bothered to check with the new or old version since I have 2 gigs of ram.


RE: screenshots
By Xavian on 5/15/2006 3:55:26 AM , Rating: 2
if you are talking about videos in HD, then no matter what player you use, its gonna hog some serious CPU (unless you have on-GPU hardware acceleration), even with a Athlon64 3700+ , videos encoded at clear 1080p cause serious slowdowns.


RE: screenshots
By RMSistight on 5/15/2006 12:35:35 PM , Rating: 1
Yeah seriously. I have an AMD Athlon 3800+ X2 dual core and when I play full 1080p movies, my CPU performance fluctuates between 25-45% CPU loads. Sometimes, it jumps to 80-90%! I'm thinking to myself I may need a dual processor dual core setup.


another crap version?
By KashGarinn on 5/15/2006 5:27:17 AM , Rating: 5
Until windows media player actually pauses the bloody video with the spacebar, instead of ctrl-p, I'm not going to use it.

Until then it's either MPC or VLC for me.




RE: another crap version?
By biohzrd on 5/15/2006 7:39:03 AM , Rating: 2
Agreed. whoever thought ctrl-p was a quick way to pause needs to be shot. For me, its either BSPlayer or PowerDVD depending on video type, and winamp for audio. Not really interested in another shatty media player.


RE: another crap version?
By RDGadz on 5/15/2006 10:32:52 AM , Rating: 1
There are many keyboards on the market with a "pause" button that can pause media player even when you don't have it selected. There are also mice available that have pause, play, and volume buttons.

Why would I want to make keyboard shortcuts that also effect other programs... everytime I pause something while typing a paper it gives me an extra space?

Not acceptable!


By BernardP on 5/15/2006 3:42:39 PM , Rating: 2
Can someone tell me if the forced Auto-Rewind at the end of videos has been fixed in WMP 11? I would like any video I play in WMP to stop on the last frame, not to rewind at the beginning. Only .wmv format videos do not auto-rewind, for some reason.
In WMP 10, The Auto-Rewind option is greyed out. It is there, but Microsoft has decided to disable it.


so
By Wwhat on 5/15/06, Rating: 0
RE: so
By michal1980 on 5/15/06, Rating: -1
RE: so
By RDGadz on 5/15/2006 1:32:33 PM , Rating: 2
its actually pretty cool, and you also can't have subscription based music without media player. All subscription based services use media player to sync with the registered portable device.

screen space hogging? what about the feature that lets you minimize it so that one can still operate it from the taskbar?

DRM and personal ads benefit us all.. where have you been the last 3 years? Aparently unaware of some little companies called Apple and Google...


RE: so
By Wwhat on 5/15/2006 8:02:24 PM , Rating: 2
I certainly avoid apple and itunes yes, and avoid subscription music.
And I avoid DRM whenever I can and feel damn good about it.

And google, isn't that the company that censors the chinese? and germans? and french? and americans?

(I do use google of course nontheless, because there's no alternative, I tried)


RE: so
By Wwhat on 5/15/06, Rating: 0
RE: so
By SteelyKen on 5/15/2006 8:58:37 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
DRM and personal ads benefit us all..


Please explain your reasoning. This I gotta hear.


A few days early?
By Bonrock on 5/15/2006 12:51:57 AM , Rating: 2
Wasn't there a rumor a few days ago that the Public Preview version of WMP11 is coming out this Wednesday anyway?

Oh who cares, I'm going to download this anyway. It just looks too damn sweet to pass up.




nice Album column but...
By Visual on 5/15/2006 3:32:09 AM , Rating: 2
This Album column seems to works very well when the tracks are sorted by album, but what happens if you have two albums A and B and then sort the tracks by something else? Track number for example, so your songs get arranged like A1 B1 A2 B2 A3 B3...
In such a case I definitely wouldn't want the giant space-waster album art be repeated on every row... can anyone that used the app tell mw how they solve this?




Windows XP x64 Edition
By kmcgill on 5/15/2006 3:52:19 PM , Rating: 2
Just downloaded and installed...doesn't support x64 edition.....WOW64 is the 32 bit emulator, so why won't it work? Oh well, unless there's a 64 bit version, I'm stickin with WMV10.




...something about a rat's ass
By spindoc on 5/15/2006 5:38:57 PM , Rating: 2
Media Player 6 forever!




By zinger1 on 6/14/2006 2:36:11 PM , Rating: 2
What does "uhg" represent or mean?




"When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." -- Sony BMG attorney Jennifer Pariser

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