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Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

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Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#71

Post by izacus »

cf100clunk wrote: post #22
est31 wrote: post #16

Removing 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…

HEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.

VideoLAN wants you to pay the royalty for x265 and you'll get sued by patent pools if you use it in a company (and are big enough).

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#72

Post by tredre3 »

cf100clunk wrote: post #22
est31 wrote: post #16

Removing 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…

HEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.

It's not about the code. The open source implementations are also subject to patent laws, they just ignore them and put the responsibility on the user. And users don't know/care about it so in the end they get playback for free.

That is why some distributions (RHEL derivatives, for example) do not ship support for many codecs out of the box and they make you jump to (admittedly simple) hoops to get it working.

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#73

Post by dist-epoch »

IronWolve wrote: post #21

Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?

It stopped being a thing about 10 years ago.

Mostly because everything is H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, MP3 or AAC.

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#75

Post by sombragris »

cfiggers wrote: post #34
concinds wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers' is an unacceptable tradeoff, they deserve the backlash.

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here. Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab ... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.

No, no and no.

Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit.

Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#76

Post by tredre3 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #10
megamike wrote: post #2

Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?

Well there's an old kid in town, MPC-HC is still being maintained[1] to the great joy for us who dislike the VLC UX. [1]: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/

It's nice to see that someone revived MPC-HC (again). For a while MPC-BE[1] was the alternative. I don't know how they compare today, but the latter is still great.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#77

Post by plorkyeran »

notpushkin wrote: post #47
accrual wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved the K-Lite Codec Pack and CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) back in the XP days, especially while exploring MKVs and anime, but I virtually never run into a media file that VLC or MPC-HC can't play by default these days. Just drop it in and it plays.

If I understand correctly, most of what K-Lite / CCCP did was wrapping libavcodec/libavformat for the Windows APIs, so native players could use them. VLC just ships with libavcodec included, so it supports all these formats. Not sure about MPC-HC nowadays (it used to use Windows APIs, but you’d usually get it with your codec pack installer anyway).

K-lite originally was a giant mess of stuff that gradually got pruned down as the libav-based things got better and covered more of what was needed. These days it's just mpc-hc plus lavfilters and a few incidental tools.

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#78

Post by reenorap »

sombragris wrote: post #75
cfiggers wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here. Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab ... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.

No, no and no. Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit. Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.

From CS101 it’s called virtual memory. Things get swapped in and out of memory when they need to. An extra 200MB of memory when Chrome takes gigabytes of memory is a petty thing to complain about.

How much do you want to bet you don’t even use windows media player? It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#79

Post by [deleted] »

cfiggers wrote: post #34
concinds wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers' is an unacceptable tradeoff, they deserve the backlash.

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here. Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab ... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.

[deleted]

Re: Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

#80

Post by saidinesh5 »

est31 wrote: post #16

Removing 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…

Wouldn't HEVC licences already be paid by the hardware/gpu vendors on most devices? And Microsoft just exposes api for that hardware?

Is this just for a purely software implementation of it?

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