Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?
MPC is better if you're on Windows.
Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
11–20 of 193 posts
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#12M$ knows the laws will change in their favor requiring a gov ID to boot a computer. This is how they will get away with crap like this.
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#13What? I can find at least one article from 2018 about HEVC being pay-walled? [0]
EDIT: Also, what do they mean by "new" Media Player? It shipped in 2022 [1]. This article is garbage. The source article [2] is fine.
[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-v...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022)
[2]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-w...
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#14Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?
[deleted]
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#15A solution for AC-3 is to get Dolby Digital Plus decoder for PC OEMs from here:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_inst...
and then you recieve the latest update from windows store.
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#16Removing HEVC support wasn't their choice but probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices [1].
Windows media player probably sees very little usage nowadays and probably even less for HEVC, when most content playback happens via streaming and browsers today.
As for the RAM increase, well that's probably a consequence of the general trend of doing frontend engineering via JS/TS instead of using OS native frontend APIs. The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily, and probably LLMs know way better how to deal with a react app than an UML one.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/lawsuits-licensing-a...
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#17[flagged]
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#18What? I can find at least one article from 2018 about HEVC being pay-walled? [0] EDIT: Also, what do they mean by "new" Media Player? It shipped in 2022 [1]. This article is garbage. The source article [2] is fine. [0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-v... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022) [2]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-w...
So it started sucking almost a decade ago, checks out in my experience
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#19HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.
Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.
Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
#20[deleted]