Grahm Skee vs. Windows Media Player 11: FIGHT!

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/arch...am-adoption.php

"Let’s face it, Windows Media Player is a dog- its slow, fails to play anything outside of a few major codecs, and it fails to extend its usefulness to portable devices. Microsoft’s own Zune media player even outperforms WMP in many aspects, only failing at more of the hardcore features such as library organization and tag editing. Ditching the WMP code and building on top of the Zune software or opening the Zune software up to all all MP3 players would be an ideal approach, but I doubt either will happen. So instead here are 3 extremely critical aspects WMP need in order to be a viable media player for the masses."



Grahm Skee from anythingbutipod hits upon some very critical points on what's wrong with Windows Media Player 11. The title of his post is a bit peculiar, because Windows Media Player is certainly a mainstream application (anything that ships with Windows qualifies for that title), but he's dead on with the problems that Windows Media Player 11 has. After the break you'll find my quickly-brainstormed list of what needs fixing.

1. Dynamically resize album art: if I have big 800 x 800 album art, resize it to the Now Playing window using high-quality bicubic scaling so the quality is retained.
2. Codec/DirectShow Support: Support for Divx and h.264 is a must, and a radically more user-friendly codec install routine is also crucial. Right now when someone downloads a video or audio file and it doesn’t play, they think Windows Media Player sucks – they don’t understand codecs (nor should they have to).
3. Don’t show me ReadyBoost devices as on the left pane (best case scenario), or let me right-click on the device and let me permanently hide it (worst case scenario). If something is flagged by the system as a ReadyBoost device, it’s probably not also storing music…
4. Performance: I was browsing my library, which consists of about 12,000 tracks, and even on a Core 2 Duo 2.9 Ghz system with 3 GB of RAM and a 15,000 RPM Raptor drive, the performance of the library during scroll and seeking functions was a bit sluggish. Much, much better than WMP10, but more improvements are needed. Even changing the window size of WMP11 is sluggish.
   
5. Album Art: I embed my album art, 600 x 600 JPGs, and 99% of it comes from scans I did of my 800+ CDs. Yes, I really like high-quality album art. The fact that Windows Media Player traffics in low-quality, overly compressed, crappy looking album art is a source of constant frustration for me. WMP12 should recognize that when album art is embedded, there’s no reason to do the extraction and saving of the album art externally. Furthermore, external album art is like having externalized EXIF data for a JPEG image – it just doesn’t make sense.
6. More aggressive content refreshing locally and on a network resource: I’d like to know that when I rip a new CD and put it on my Windows Home Server it will show up in my library within a minute or less. The Zune software is GREAT at finding new library content.
7. Insane CPU Usage: Just today I had WMP11 open, and it was using 90%+ of my total CPU resources. No, it wasn't transcoding anything in the background - it was either the remote scanning of my shared media folder, or the media library scanning from my Windows Home Server. Either way, it's frustrating to have to shut down the program and re-start it "just because".
8. Lots of stupid little bugs such as anything with a genre of "A Capella" being re-named to "A capella a Capella".

Do you use Windows Media Player 11 regularly? What do you think could be improved?

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/arch...am-adoption.php

"Let’s face it, Windows Media Player is a dog- its slow, fails to play anything outside of a few major codecs, and it fails to extend its usefulness to portable devices. Microsoft’s own Zune media player even outperforms WMP in many aspects, only failing at more of the hardcore features such as library organization and tag editing. Ditching the WMP code and building on top of the Zune software or opening the Zune software up to all all MP3 players would be an ideal approach, but I doubt either will happen. So instead here are 3 extremely critical aspects WMP need in order to be a viable media player for the masses."



Grahm Skee from anythingbutipod hits upon some very critical points on what's wrong with Windows Media Player 11. The title of his post is a bit peculiar, because Windows Media Player is certainly a mainstream application (anything that ships with Windows qualifies for that title), but he's dead on with the problems that Windows Media Player 11 has. After the break you'll find my quickly-brainstormed list of what needs fixing.

1. Dynamically resize album art: if I have big 800 x 800 album art, resize it to the Now Playing window using high-quality bicubic scaling so the quality is retained.
2. Codec/DirectShow Support: Support for Divx and h.264 is a must, and a radically more user-friendly codec install routine is also crucial. Right now when someone downloads a video or audio file and it doesn’t play, they think Windows Media Player sucks – they don’t understand codecs (nor should they have to).
3. Don’t show me ReadyBoost devices as on the left pane (best case scenario), or let me right-click on the device and let me permanently hide it (worst case scenario). If something is flagged by the system as a ReadyBoost device, it’s probably not also storing music…
4. Performance: I was browsing my library, which consists of about 12,000 tracks, and even on a Core 2 Duo 2.9 Ghz system with 3 GB of RAM and a 15,000 RPM Raptor drive, the performance of the library during scroll and seeking functions was a bit sluggish. Much, much better than WMP10, but more improvements are needed. Even changing the window size of WMP11 is sluggish.
   
5. Album Art: I embed my album art, 600 x 600 JPGs, and 99% of it comes from scans I did of my 800+ CDs. Yes, I really like high-quality album art. The fact that Windows Media Player traffics in low-quality, overly compressed, crappy looking album art is a source of constant frustration for me. WMP12 should recognize that when album art is embedded, there’s no reason to do the extraction and saving of the album art externally. Furthermore, external album art is like having externalized EXIF data for a JPEG image – it just doesn’t make sense.
6. More aggressive content refreshing locally and on a network resource: I’d like to know that when I rip a new CD and put it on my Windows Home Server it will show up in my library within a minute or less. The Zune software is GREAT at finding new library content.
7. Insane CPU Usage: Just today I had WMP11 open, and it was using 90%+ of my total CPU resources. No, it wasn't transcoding anything in the background - it was either the remote scanning of my shared media folder, or the media library scanning from my Windows Home Server. Either way, it's frustrating to have to shut down the program and re-start it "just because".
8. Lots of stupid little bugs such as anything with a genre of "A Capella" being re-named to "A capella a Capella".

Do you use Windows Media Player 11 regularly? What do you think could be improved?

[Filip Norrgard]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Don’t show me ReadyBoost devices as on the left pane (best case scenario), or let me right-click on the device and let me permanently hide it (worst case scenario). If something is flagged by the system as a ReadyBoost device, it’s probably not also storing music…

Right on! While they are fixing that "feature", maybe they could add some way of turning sync off for other devices, such as my Nokia phone. I really don't like that while WMP is showing a video in fullscreen (or playing music) and you connect a device (my phone, for example) WMP *bang* opens up the Sync dialog, exits fullscreen and even though you click cancel has to switch to the dang Sync tab! Why?!

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Insane CPU Usage: Just today I had WMP11 open, and it was using 90%+ of my total CPU resources. No, it wasn't transcoding anything in the background - it was either the remote scanning of my shared media folder, or the media library scanning from my Windows Home Server. Either way, it's frustrating to have to shut down the program and re-start it "just because".

You could try Process Lasso to prevent such things, although it is a bit too rough in my opinion. Made Winamp really, really jumpy when playing music for some strange reason. (Maybe I should upgrade to a multi-core computer this year...)
EDIT: Okay, so Process Lasso is already mentioned on the front page... didn't get that far in Google Reader to spot it...