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

Post by kasabali » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

saidinesh5 wrote: post #80

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?

Post by foresto » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 7:40 PM UTC

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/

Post by hebelehubele » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

functionmouse wrote: post #4

megamike wrote: post #2

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

mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people

Post by contextfree » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

orthoxerox wrote: post #33

I kinda have to hand it to Microsoft for dogfooding vibecoding with Copilot to such an extent. You can't say they encourage their customers to use a bad solution while doing something different in-house.

Post by contextfree » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 8:07 PM UTC

LollipopYakuza wrote: post #40

Didn't they just publicly make an apology for enshitting Windows over the last years, and committed to go back to building native app? I understand that project might have started way before the public statement but it really doesn't look good from a PR standpoint.