At Macworld Conference & Expo, Microsoft Corp. announced the immediate availability of Microsoft Windows Media Player for MacOSX (6.1 MB). The new player has been Carbonized to run natively on MacOSX and displays the operating system’s new Aqua interface. Windows Media Player for Mac OS X allows Mac users to easily enjoy playback of high-quality Windows Media Audio and Video content. The new release supports the latest Windows Media Audio 8 and Windows Media Video 8, as well as Windows Media Digital Rights Management, and is available in six languages worldwide. The new player features the new Aqua interface, which provides a look consistent with many other new Mac applications. Also, The OfficeX Test Drive (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage the e-mail application and personal information manager) has been released for MacOSX as a free download (122 MB). Inside the OfficeX Test Drive you’ll see how it combines several new and improved features with core MacOSX technologies.
Windows Media Player For MacOSX Available
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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For once Windows Media Player works and looks good. I’m shocked
heh, i kinda crazy how it seems so easy to port any MS product to Mac OSX. aaaaanyway, given that apple has been so kind to give so much back to the BSD community, they’ve made their quicktime player available for all bsds and linux. oh, actually they haven’t. they provide the server, but not the client. i guess we’re just a bunch of whores.
I know there are quicktime players, but is there a way to stream quicktime from a website, on freebsd (or linux)?
I think it’s sort of funny how Mac OS X has *Windows* Media Player now. (I know it has a file format or whatever with the same name, but the name definitely implies it’s only for Windows)
Why do you think it was easy for Microsoft to port Office or the Media Player to Mac OS X? I’m betting it was anything but quick, simple, or cheap. But of course it <em>can</em> be done.
Blubber Chimp: Come on man, we all know Microsoft is hoarding an ultra secret compiler that compiles unmodified windows application code to MacOS. They have had it for years but are afraid to release it due to the flood of applications it would bring to the platform. The hard thing was not update Office/Media player for MacOS X it was updating their *Ultra Secret* cross-platform code compiler that took the time. Once it was finished, in went Office XP and out comes Office for OSX. Same with media player. Its a shame really. All those people wasting countless hours *manually* porting and rewriting code to work under MacOS… If they only knew.
-Jason
Both Media Player and Office use carbon, an cleaned-up version of the original MacOS-api’s. Porting is fairly easy once you’ve got a well-programmed classic-app, but doesn’t help you one bit to get Office for BSD/Linux.
Why does this troll keep cropping up, is everyone so ignorant? Sigh.
And applejack, you’re a retard. Apple does not have a debt to you. They have no obligation to spend $$$ on a free Quicktime player for you. The specs are open, built one yourself. You are just a lazy freeloader.
Well, this is dandy. Now that *everyone* has MS Windows Media Player, we don’t need any of those extraneous competing open media formats anymore. What a relief.
Umm.. hey,.. anybody know how to get Be’s MediaPlayer to work with these .wmv files?
write a codec?
I’ll let you do it… as I’m such a nice person…
Quicktime is not a codec, it’s a multimedia-architecture that can take various kinds of plugins. Quicktime codecs are one of those.
The architecture is fully specified and there already are a few open source project underway to built it for Linux. This doesn’t do Linux-users that much good as most .movs are compressed with the Sorenson codec. Sorenson doesn’t seem interested in creating a version for Linux. They have an exclusive deal with Apple and clearly don’t see any reason to port their codec (and work at changing the deal). In our capitalist society they are not required to do so.
I see only one good solution for this: create and popularize an open source codec. OpenDivx may fit the bill. If you can’t program you might donate some money to http://www.projectmayo.com. But whatever you do, stop blaming Apple with your uninformed blatter.