Jason Dunn
11-20-2006, 08:00 PM
I was on a newly rebuilt system the other day, with Windows Media Player 11 installed, and I tried playing an AVI file that was encoded with XVID. I watched as WMP11 recognized that it was missing the codec, but I got a little excited when it connected to an online service and actually downloaded a file! I thought "Wow, they finally made WMP11 usable to end users who are clueless about codecs!". Then dismay set in when I saw that even after the download, the file wouldn't play. I clicked on the little red exclamation, and was shown this pop-up:
http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/wmp11-missing-codec.png
Clicking Web Help took me to this page (http://tinyurl.com/ylceuq) that basically told me to go search for the codec myself. Why can't Microsoft make this easier? What exactly is the barrier to auto-delivering codecs - is it that companies like Divx don't want their codecs distributed in that way? I have a hard time believing that the open-source Xvid people would object to it.
http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/wmp11-missing-codec.png
Clicking Web Help took me to this page (http://tinyurl.com/ylceuq) that basically told me to go search for the codec myself. Why can't Microsoft make this easier? What exactly is the barrier to auto-delivering codecs - is it that companies like Divx don't want their codecs distributed in that way? I have a hard time believing that the open-source Xvid people would object to it.