Submitted by Microsoft has officially halted development of its Windows Media Player for the Mac and plans no future Apple Computer versions of its music-playing software, CNET News.com has learned.
“It’s basically a business decision for Microsoft,” Anderson said. “Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers.” Instead, users should now use this, which has a few problems though, according to some Mac users.
Are there any other alternatives? (VideoLan? MplayerOSX? others…)
Are there any other alternatives? (VideoLan? MplayerOSX? others…)
Actually MS now redistributes the Flip4Mac Quicktime plugin ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/flip4mac.mspx ) which used to be payware for free. It’s pretty good too.
BUT! Here’s the catch : it doesn’t support DRM’ed files. It’s no mystery then why they dropped official support then, Apple’s one of the main competitors in the DRM content gig.
Edit:splelchzeck
Edited 2006-01-13 21:29
Yeah replying and then NOT answering the question, nice
What I meant to say was that I’ve been using Flip4Mac for about half a year now on my mini and it’s never crashed on me. Sometimes it doesn’t play (presumably) DRM’ed content but on the whole its pretty good and faster than starting up Windows Media Player.
VLC is the undisputed king of players as far as I’m concerned, though I don’t like the interface. Another up-and-coming one is Xineplayer ( http://xineplayer.berlios.de/ ) which uses the more familiar all in one interface.
And hey you never know, now that Apple is moving to intel we might be able to use the Windows dll’s like people do on Linux !
After all MS MediaPlayer is most hated player
Right, then why the MS Mediaplayer-less version of Windows was a big dud in Europe?. Seems to me everybody wants Windows Media Player.
No, not everybody wants MSWMP, but they just don’t know there are lots of players beside wmp:)
After all MS MediaPlayer is most hated player
RealPlayer haters might want to disagree. OSNews should do a survey
.
The Windows version of MSN Messenger and Mediaplayer are actually some of Microsofts GOOD products, what disappoints many Mac aficiando’s like myself, is the half-assed, half-baked crap that Microsoft pushes out as their ‘pledge’ to support the Mac platform.
MSN Messenger would be the PRIME example of this in action, for example, features that are supported in THIRD PARTY messengers (bringing them close to MSN 7 compatibility) that Microsofts Mac team can’t be bothered with.
Maybe the solution to MSN Messenger is to release a plugin for iChat, and allow Apple to start shipping MSN capabilities with iChat out of the box – if Microsoft seems so incapable ot actually getting their act together.
Assuming the little annoyances can be fixed, a windows media component for quicktime is ideal.
Are there no alternatives like VLC, divx player, real alternative, qt alternative for Macs?
AFAIK but dont hold me to this, VLC is not available on OS X, DivX is only available as a QT Plugin, theres only really MPlayerOS X as far as i’m aware, but ffmpeg for anything above WMV7/8 in my experience is a joke,
umm… VLC has been available on OS X for ever… and it does a better job of movie playback than QT.
VLC does not have a Safari plugin. This is most needed.
yeah, that is true.
Just wondering why they would shut off support maybe becasue they quit developeing IE for Mac? It sucks since Windows Media player is the most pervasive player out their and is second only to Quick time. I refuse to install that virus Realplayer.
MSFT is struggling and they are trying to focus on stuff they sell instead of giving away.
I doubt that i would be more apt to believe that microsfot would rather not contribute more then what they have already to the sucess of Mac OS X on the PC.
MSFT only makes money of Windows and Office– MSN, IE, XBox etc are all failures. Cash-strapped govts are looking at OpenOffice. It took big bribery bucks recently for MSFT to prevent Massachusetts from Office to Open Office. Vista is looking pretty dull; still not UNIX; a hodge-podge of OSX like eye-candy and search features. I am serious MSFT is the KayPro of the 21st century.
BTW: AAPL beat Dell in Market Cap today! Yeah! Now if they can just do that based on Mac sales instead of based on iPod sales…..
BTW: AAPL beat Dell in Market Cap today! Yeah! Now if they can just do that based on Mac sales instead of based on iPod sales…..
No kidding, again one of the major factors in Mactels sucess is games. I hope game developers are more apt to port to Mactel now that PPC is gone.
It took big bribery bucks recently for MSFT to prevent Massachusetts from Office to Open Office.
What are you talking about? Mass. never said anything about switching to OpenOffice.org, they were switching to OpenDocument format, and they are still going to do that.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060106131844449
Check the date on that article if you bother reading it.
“BTW: AAPL beat Dell in Market Cap today! Yeah! Now if they can just do that based on Mac sales instead of based on iPod sales…..”
It is true, and its a great comeback, but the story is a bit more complicated than it may seem, if you look at the 2005 financials.
Apple’s revenues were 14 billion, net income 1.3
Dell revenues were 54, net income 3.
Apple is on a P/E ratio of 46 at the moment.
Apples computer business is said (Forbes) to be 45% of sales. Say roughly 7 billion. So in computers, it is around 15% the size of Dell.
Don’t get too excited about the total market cap, which is just like the very low cap a couple of years ago, more a matter of the emotions of hedge fund operators than anything fundamental. But do notice that Apple is not going to get to be the size of Dell in computing any time soon with current strategies. Nor is it terribly likely to maintain a P/E ratio in the 40s for any considerable time. Nor is it likely to maintain its current margins.
People get so emotional about this stuff, so I want to be clear: it is not knocking Apple. It is just saying, its a good story, but it is not quite as good as it many seem before you look closely, and there are one or two bumps coming up. Not disasters, but bumps. If you are thinking of buying in to the story, be careful. As Warren Buffet said, the time to be greedy is when others are fearful. The time to be fearful is when no-one else is.
Realplayer for Mac is actually halfway decent. It’s the Windows version that’s evil.
Besides, the current WMP9 for Mac works fine on my iBook G4; I haven’t experienced any of the trouble mentioned in some of the other posts.
vlc and mplayer on os x are both sub-par solutions imo. neither of them are stable nor work well in the os x interface.
quicktime isnt ideal either, but if i could get components for all media types and just use quicktime i would. wmp on osx = suck. enough said.
realplayer on os x is actually decent. its nothing like its leech of a brother for windows. then again, the real codecs leave a bad taste…
Edited 2006-01-13 19:40
QT is not that bad of a player on OS X… and VLC is not unstable either (in fact, it has been rock solid for me)
WMP Mac barely supported modern WMV files, doesn’t support DRM’d files, and is slower than shit… like 10000x worse than QuickTime on Windows.
WMP on my ibook g4 is garbage, its interface sucks, half the controls dont work and playback is spotty as all getout. the flip4mac plugin works better in quicktime and i dont have that blight of MS on my machine. Trust me NO ONE in the mac community will shed a tear over this.
In return for developing and maintaining the plugin, as well as some compensation from MS.
This means to reach out to millions of Mac users on Safari with QT, web designers have to not rely 100% on MS formats and IE.
So when Mac users come across a site that’s either all WMP and/or IE, they have a legitimate complaint, IE and WMP are no longer supported on the Mac platform.
There is so many totally anal sites that are IE only, it’s about time.
Hurry for the end of MS domination!!
Linux, Firefox and Mac users celebrate!
is cripleware
What will be used in it’s place? their are many websites that required WMP inorder to watch streaming video.
Its been bugging me for a long time if there would be another update for WMP for Mac. They MS woman at the keynote the otherday sorta implied it was dead.
I don’t understand the hatred of WMP here. Yeah, its a bit bad on windows. But the mac version was rather nice and clean. The only problem with it is it hasn’t been updated in years, thus lots of files just don’t work in it, and lots of internet WMP dependent files never work. But thats the fault of not being updated, not the the way the current WMP is.
OSX also doesn’t play nice with it. If its a file that both QT and WMP support. OSX refuses to let WMP open it.
Quicktime is fine. My only real issue with quicktime is that everytime you open a video, it keeps it at its native size, instead of retaining the size of window you already had opened. So you have to continually re-size the QT window over and over. That was something nice about WMP, it got that right.
I don’t know why people suggest VLC. I don’t care if something supports everything under the sun. It has a awful interface, its not a replacement for anything until it gets a nice interface like QT or WMP.
It doesnt refuse to let WMP9 play it you just highlight the file, go to “file” menu and select “open with” or if you have a 2 buttoned mouse just right click the file and select “open with”
Thats what I’m talking about. OSX won’t let it do that. The only files it will allow WMP to try and open are WMV, and ASFs.
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that MS is pulling out some of their freeware (and with it, certain compatibilities) from OS X because it’s getting too popular in their eyes.
But perhaps Gates’s strategy could backfire and, with IE’s and Windows Media formats’ user-base having been deliberately cut down, and slightly limited, popular web sites will stop using bad web-standards and crappy media formats, and they will eventually wither away. This is unlikely, but still fun to speculate.
Also, Apple and Microsoft seem to have become buddies over the years,– making software for each other’s OS (usually at the expense of Mac OS’s newly acquired Unix-based step-brothers and -sisters) –I think it will be interesting to see how Jobs reacts to his comrade pulling out of this unspoken(?) agreement. Perhaps a similar compatibility alliance with Linux, this time at Windows’ expense?
Playing videos on OSX is actually the worst thing about my mac I think.
VLC/Mplayer/Quicktime all suck in comparison to things like media player classic on windows IMO.
Edited 2006-01-14 05:45