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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

#151

Post by make3 »

contextfree wrote: post #97
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.

This app is a reskinned Groove Music, it was mostly written back in the early Windows 10 days (2014-2017) and long predates Copilot/etc. Even the Windows 11 rebrand as Media Player (2022?) predates that stuff, and it's barely been touched since then.

OP was clearly a joke about Copilot making bad code

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

#153

Post by breve »

concinds wrote: post #29
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…

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

> It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers

What's easiest for both users and developers is royalty-free video formats.

AV1 is solution to these video format licensing problems. Microsoft is part of the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/

Dolby has made direct threats to the royalty-free status of AV1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

So Microsoft and all the AOMedia members will need to defend AV1 if they want it to remain royalty-free.

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

#154

Post by breve »

contextfree wrote: post #102
jjcm wrote: post #61

I think what I find fascinating about this is it's a native app with no web version... and they still decided to write it in html/js. This is after Microsoft's commitment to rebuild things in WinUI. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the barrier of friction that native presents compared to html/js, but that barrier has lowered so much with the advent of agentic development. It just feels like things weren't tho…

1. It does not use HTML/JS. It is a fully "native" app (at least if C# counts as native) written with C# and UWP/WinUI2 XAML. Actually, Xbox Music in Windows 8.x had a web tech based UI; when it was rebranded as Groove Music in Windows 10, its UI layer was rewritten. Xbox Music itself in turn was a reskin/rewrite of the UI layer of Zune (which was C++) so it's already been through full cycle of native->web->native. (…

> at least if C# counts as native

It can count as native. You can turn on Native AOT compilation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

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

#155

Post by breve »

dist-epoch wrote: post #73
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.

And Opus: https://opus-codec.org/

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

#156

Post by contextfree »

make3 wrote: post #151
contextfree wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This app is a reskinned Groove Music, it was mostly written back in the early Windows 10 days (2014-2017) and long predates Copilot/etc. Even the Windows 11 rebrand as Media Player (2022?) predates that stuff, and it's barely been touched since then.

OP was clearly a joke about Copilot making bad code

it's a reasonable-sounding inference (if your only context is that there's a "new" Media Player and it's taking more memory) that doesn't apply in this particular case.

A joke can be "funny because it's true"

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

#157

Post by contextfree »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #83
VladVladikoff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Microsoft has written more application development frameworks than you can shake a stick at. They've also failed to gain traction with virtually all of them, even internally.

WinUI2/UWP was heavily adopted internally though?* Most Windows shell UI and built-in apps use it at this point.

* (at least within the Windows organization; maybe not so much in other parts of Microsoft)

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

#158

Post by ruszki »

qmr wrote: post #143
ruszki wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 100s of processes running on my Windows without starting anything explicitly. They are using more than 10 gb of RAM. I am already feeling the consequences of this sloppiness. Especially that my IDE/compiler/emulator easily use 20+ GB. My 32 GB of memory is not enough somehow…

Why would you use such a system?

Because no matter what a lot of people say here: you still need to be lucky to have a fully functioning system on Linux without continuous roadblocks everywhere. And I’m saying this after using Linux for more than a quarter of a century, occasionally as my main OS. I switched from it back just a few months ago, after I gave up to figure out how to have more uptime on battery for half a year, how to make my monitors with widely different DPIs work properly (literally without crashing the whole system), how to simply play a video reliably, and these just after solving a bunch of different issues already. And my lifestyle really doesn’t allow that battery drain issue at all.

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

#159

Post by ruszki »

knollimar wrote: post #137
ruszki wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 100s of processes running on my Windows without starting anything explicitly. They are using more than 10 gb of RAM. I am already feeling the consequences of this sloppiness. Especially that my IDE/compiler/emulator easily use 20+ GB. My 32 GB of memory is not enough somehow…

Whats wrong with 100MB*100?

It’s funny, because I don’t expect more features from Windows than Windows XP, or let’s pretend that I need more security (I don’t, but I know a lot of folks need them), then Windows 7. But even those could have been reduced greatly. I remember that I could disable at least half of the services in XP without losing anything. Maybe the only features since back then which I use are proper DPI scaling, individual app sound level settings, and maybe the favorite folders in Explorer, but I’m not sure whether this later one didn’t exist back then.

If they would provide that (with security patches of course), then they wouldn’t need “quick startup” and other bullshits to make things “quicker”.

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

#160

Post by Timon3 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #114
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Computers can execute multiple different programs at the same time, so users are able to run a media player while their main focus is on a different window, tile, monitor or whatever else.

Given that 8GB machines are still widely in use (and will get even more common over the next years), 250MB of extra RAM use is a pretty huge portion of user's available RAM pool, so this is quite a big change.

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