Windows Media Player is no longer an essential addition to Windows and there are quality third-party alternatives, such as VLC Media Player. Microsoft’s offers the Films & TV app in Windows 10 as an alternative to Windows Media Player, but the legacy player remains the default player on Windows 7 devices.
Today, we spotted a new support document which was quietly published yesterday and it has revealed that Microsoft is retiring a feature that is being used in Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player.
This is a small change, but it marks the beginning of the end for Windows 7.
I do not think i have used Windows Media Player since windows 98 (at least as far as i can remember). It is usually one of the first things i remove when possible.
Windows Media Player was great for internet radio because of its radio station guide and search functions, I used it extensively for this up to the demise of XP where Microsoft shut down the servers and the radio station guide. I still miss that.
It is/was crap for anything else though.
Many years ago on a Windows XP box, some version of WMP decided to touch the files I’d downloaded as it compiled its library. (The download date was one of the most important sort criteria I used.) Sure, it was a bug, but this was such *utterly* unacceptable behaviour that I have never let WMP even run on any of my computers ever since. It can die in a ditch as far as I’m concerned.
It looks more like they’re shutting down the web servers that older WMP/WMC relied on to match and pull down new metadata. It seems that existing metadata information and whatever it can extract from things like ID3 tags etc will still work.
Kinda surprised it hadn’t happened already given Win7’s support status. Probably related to some contractural support term expiring.