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

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111–120 of 193 posts

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

#111
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…

>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 Can someone explain to me why these multi operating system app building tools don’t compile down to native code and leverage native APIs? Is there nothing like that available?

The web browser is a compiled program. The problem is that it’s a huge program.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> VLC VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP. More directly, do you not find it odd and embarrassing for a tech giant to be unable to beat a bunch of volunteers? I mean, ffmpeg famously hand-writes a lot of as…

The older I get the more volunteer software projects I donate to. VLC being one of them.

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

#113
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no nuance in 400%...

Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant

1*4*[all programs on your computer] is very significant. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses. The practical difference between 370MB and 100MB is basically nil for any normal workload. It affects nothing but how many unlikely-to-be-used files fit in the page cache.

Now multiply that opinion by every application on your computer. Including the start bar and notepad.exe.

There's a special case argument to be made in favor of ignoring media player resource consumption, given the maximum number of ears and eyes per human.

I expect there's someone out there who tiles 10 instances of simultaneously playing audio/visual media, but that's not most of us.

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

#115
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant

That's how it started though, it's a slippery slope :\

Maybe a sales tax scaling with code size, memory use, and processor time for commercial software - a scale based on a 'model' computer that costs 3% of the median American's income - would disincentivise the shift to web languages, which has been happening because investors want to squeeze developers down to burger flipper pay levels.

Software made in 2005-2015 is no less capable than that today, except the lack of cloud cancer and AI gimmickry. "Downgrading" to those is actually a real upgrade today!

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses. The practical difference between 370MB and 100MB is basically nil for any normal workload. It affects nothing but how many unlikely-to-be-used files fit in the page cache.

Now multiply that opinion by every application on your computer. Including the start bar and notepad.exe.

I normally don't have notepad.exe or the windows media player open, so it's irrelevant. Chrome, clangd, rustc, etc. are all that matter. Optimizing anything else fails the pareto principle. I definitely do not want Microsoft paying its engineers to optimize windows media player memory usage.

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

#117
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…

[dead]

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

#119
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

If mpv on Linux and MPC-HC on Windows, what is recommended on macOS?

[deleted]

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

#120

Well it's written in managed code, what do you expect? Windows core apps used to be pure C++. Cry long enough about "safe" languages and expect to take the RAM hit.

WinUI, WinAppSDK are built on top of WinRT, which is C++ for the most part.

That is the whole joke about it, Windows division tried to kill .NET with their updated COM based on Vista victory over Longhorn, and the whole AddRef/Release makes it slower than WPF applications.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

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