Channel 9 Forums - Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

scobleizer — Thu, 20 May 2004 01:37:08 GMT

I was talking with Chad Gibson today. He's a lead program manager on the Windows Media team.

He told me a whole bunch of things he's working on, but then turned to me and said "I wish I had better information from real-world customers about what sucks in their audio and video experiences?"

What messes up multimedia for you?

For instance, does your video get cruddy when you turn on a device?

Is your audio glitching when your anti-virus program kicks in?

Are you getting the video quality you'd expect?

What's the first things you'd like to see us work on some more?

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Neil — Thu, 20 May 2004 02:29:37 GMT

I'll bite. It's the simple things: selecting a different song to listen to is so painfully slow. It's the task I do probably 10-15 times a day (I'm not much of a playlist builder), and it takes so long to bring WMP up, get to the search bar, filter, and then play the song. It's pure performance (the UI isn't so bad).

It's even worse when I want to see the list of songs I've purchased through Napster. Those are typically the one-off singles that are running through my head, and it takes an excrutiatingly long time to click to the Napster tab, hit their site, and list the music I've purchased. There should be an easy way to do that!

Neil

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

bitmask — Thu, 20 May 2004 03:46:15 GMT

Maybe slightly OT but..

Just this week I became frustrated with Windows Media Player 8 on my IPAQ (Pocket PC 2002) [perhaps an upgrade is in order?].

I've found it impossible to play media files over 5 minutes in length. No MSDN TV, no .NET Rocks, no audio books. After about 5 minutes playback starts to garble. I tried a .NET Rocks episode and it started to loop, or skip like a bad CD after 6 minutes. Rory Blyth sounded like a barking dog.

Is this just me? Is PPC 2003 better?

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

PaoloM — Thu, 20 May 2004 05:36:55 GMT

Find a way to put some kind of order into the mystical and strange world of codecs. I lost the count how many times WMP9 tries to go "somewhere" to get a video codec and ends up saying "Error: codec not found" (or something like that)

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

PaoloM — Thu, 20 May 2004 05:39:23 GMT

And WMP9 for my Toshiba e740 PocketPC (2002), yes

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

MarcHoeppner — Thu, 20 May 2004 07:49:09 GMT

- long start-up time of media player in general
- things in the background (like copying a large file) bring the OS to a halt, consequently ruining the 'multimedia' experience
- codec hassles (there never seems to be the right codec on the machine you happen to use)

maybe the thing I really *hate* most is that simple tasks such as mentioned above (copying a large file) really mess with the foreground processes. Just try to copy 100GB to a network share and try to continue to work. Or open up VS.NET and a project from VSS and then try to use media player or even open windows explorer to look for a file...

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

androidi — Thu, 20 May 2004 08:09:39 GMT

First entirely WMP related feedback:

WMP has few minor gripes, some that were introduced after version "6.4".

- Countless times I've tried to get the codec properties opened and never I manage to find where that is done from.

- Also often I want to play video while doing something else but cannot, where did the "always on top" go?

- I'd also default to not messing around with the video size while in full screen playback, currently video is resized when the control bars appear on top and bottom. There's a plugin to disable that but it often loses it's settings.

- Also I'd love ESC to escape from both the fullscreen mode and the player when in windowed mode (especially when viewing certain educational material).

- Double-click should go to full screen and back on DVD movies also, except if the mouse pointer is on top of a dvd menu hotspot.

WM/Ch9 related feedback:

The videos on Channel 9 take quite long to open even on a decent low latency 1 Mbit connection. Probably due to the bandwidth detection I'd guess. Also anything much less than 300 kbit is pain to both watch and listen. They should offer like 300,800,1500 kbit, after all broadband is quite common these days and if i had a slow connection I wouldn't stand the low quality anyway, I'd rather take a hour to download good quality for offline viewing. This could be achieved on Ch9 by categorizing the videos and having slow connection users subscribe to a "video push" service that sends the good quality videos when the user bandwidth is sitting idle and user has also been idle for a while.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ChuckBuc — Thu, 20 May 2004 08:26:58 GMT

I had a project I had been playing around with to organize my mp3s. Shortly after I started it I was playing around with direct play form the DirectX 9 SDK. Absolutely brilliant; with just a few lines of code I had an organizer/player. I actually giggled when it worked.

MyMed = Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.Audio.FromFile(File)

MyMed.Play()

MyMed.SeekCurrentPosition(1, Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.SeekPositionFlags.SeekToKeyFrame)

'Hack: There is a problem with some mp3 files where it plays from position 0 then no sound is heard, the file will play if it is started from 1 though

A few things that I ran into was that some mp3s would not play from the start, I would have to forward the position to one to get the mp3 to play. Another great thing would be have some equalizer control and play speed control.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

androidi — Thu, 20 May 2004 08:33:02 GMT

Perhaps I shouldn't start guessing, but I'll do it anyway:

MarcHoeppner wrote:

- long start-up time of media player in general
- things in the background (like copying a large file) bring the OS to a halt, consequently ruining the 'multimedia' experience

These can most likely be attributed to both the OS and FS implementation etc. Forgetting network copying, I have found that having atleast two drives, so that you never do copying inside the same drive together with HT P4 makes a quite good combination. Problems usually arise when many applications access same drive almost simultaneously. For this reason my minimum recommended configuration for XP power user is 1 GB memory, HT P4 and 3 HDD's with such setup that you can allocate heavy tasks to occur in different drives at the same time.

MarcHoeppner wrote:

- codec hassles (there never seems to be the right codec on the machine you happen to use)

Lets see, maybe the video files could carry a source code for decoding the data and then the player would compile this if necessary before playing the file. LOL. Or perhaps MS doesn't want additional legal burdens associated with some codecs. Just guessing.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ChuckBuc — Thu, 20 May 2004 08:36:48 GMT

- long start-up time of media player in general

Warning, micro-rant:

This is a big one for me. I actually miss the micro-player built into the OS of Windows 98 and on. There was no start up time. No big bulky program that had to go get a webpage from the net before it played the file, it just played it!

A quick, out site player definitely should be the default. Not something I have to go back and reconfigure my file handling for because the media player is obliged to tell me the latest news that who knows has decided is more important then playing the file I just clicked on.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

cwoodruff — Thu, 20 May 2004 11:58:04 GMT

I always know that when I start any of the media players to rip CD's that my system performance is shot for a while until the CD is done. Does not matter what player it is. If you could have a way to rip the songs better even if they took longer I would appreciate it. I don't care if a CD takes twice as long to rip as long as my system does not hang when I am writing a piece of code. Could be a setting in Media Player.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

cwoodruff — Thu, 20 May 2004 12:00:22 GMT

I forgot this. I wish I had someplace on the tool bar the ability to have a small embedded media player so I could just forward, reverse, pause and play. Maybe even see the song number. That's it!! That would make my experience better.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Lowrez — Thu, 20 May 2004 13:08:38 GMT

PaoloM wrote:

Find a way to put some kind of order into the mystical and strange world of codecs. I lost the count how many times WMP9 tries to go "somewhere" to get a video codec and ends up saying "Error: codec not found" (or something like that)

I've had this pain too often myself. I made a short video for the amusement of my friends and then edited in MS Movie Maker and burned it onto CDs. I figured that since everything had been done in MS software that it would be easy to get runing on other PCs. No way. People behind password controlled firewalls couldn't get the right codec. Folks who had WMP8 could hear the audio, but not the video and assumed I had loused it up. When it did play, it was great, but most often that meant I either had to set up their machine or play it on my machine for them. Not good.

The other thing that irks me about working with multimedia is getting the volumes all set right. Some players use the wave volume control so cranking up the music also sets the system sounds to full blast. You're in the middle of a good song and all of a sudden Outlook blasts its notice. Sometimes you get the case where you've been playing music at a comfortable volume, then you fire up WMP to watch a video and the volume is blaring! Well, player A used volume control C, but adjusting the volume actually increased the master, but WMP is using volume control Q which was already set to full blast so now you're going to bring down the house. Aieeeeee....

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

amg — Thu, 20 May 2004 14:30:27 GMT

Warning...this is harsh, candid feedback...

I would love to see a version of WMP that is more than minor patches with a major new version and marketing campaign slapped on it. I haven't seen an innovative version of WMP since I found the open-source Media Player 6.4...yikes! When Apple can drop an application onto the PC and create an overnight standard...you know something is wrong in the world of multimedia in Windows...

I would be overjoyed to see Microsoft providing a comprehensive codec collection in a non-critical section of windowsupdate (as well as pre-installed with the latest commercial release of WMP). You won't be undercutting your WMA technologies by making the entire codec process more seamless...this will also work towards the "we give users choice" schpiel that is common amongst the upper-execs in Redmond. Don't just talk the talk, folks...
This is only one, low-hanging fruit example of how to improve the WMP/WMA technologies. There are countless ways to evolve.

Microsoft is losing the multimedia battle on the PC.
Real resources need to be focused onto the WMP/WMA platforms for a while...make WMP 10 something really special and people will have no reason to go to the fruity forest for their audio/video players...

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Foss — Thu, 20 May 2004 15:04:16 GMT

PaoloM wrote:

Find a way to put some kind of order into the mystical and strange world of codecs. I lost the count how many times WMP9 tries to go "somewhere" to get a video codec and ends up saying "Error: codec not found" (or something like that)

Seconded! This is my main problem with Media Player. I have several files that'll play audio only in MP, but will play properly in some other media player, or even PowerDVD.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

dentaku — Thu, 20 May 2004 15:09:52 GMT

The only thing that really annoys me about Media player 9 is that whenever I click on a link to some streaming video it always gives me that "Internet Sharing Configuration" message that wmplayer.exe is attempteing to change this computer's internet connection protection settings.

I should simply be able to tell it to never ask me again.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Neil — Thu, 20 May 2004 15:36:09 GMT

cwoodruff wrote:

I forgot this. I wish I had someplace on the tool bar the ability to have a small embedded media player so I could just forward, reverse, pause and play. Maybe even see the song number. That's it!! That would make my experience better.

You can actually do this today with Windows Media Player today! Right click on your task bar, go to Toolbars and pick Windows Media Player. When you minimize WMP now it'll go to a little slab in the task bar that you can use to control it. VERY handy!

Neil

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Stevan Veselinovic — Thu, 20 May 2004 16:10:05 GMT

I have about 3 GB's of music on my computer, add them all to the windows media player 'playlists' and it freezes up the program.
When loading the program it takes about 50 seconds, or less, not sure.
But with a processor of 2.6 GHz i think that it should take less then 50 seconds, not to mention 5..
The taskbar feature is great, though, when resizing it to the normal window and an audio is playing, it freezes up..
Anything on that?

Ps. I lost an essay (eight pages) due to WMP...

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Stevan Veselinovic — Thu, 20 May 2004 16:18:53 GMT

What messes up multimedia for you?
   The amount of songs that i add to my play list.

For instance, does your video get cruddy when you turn on a device?
   Yes, expecially when you turn on a memory hoger.

Is your audio glitching when your anti-virus program kicks in?

Yes.. Sometimes it freezes the program.

Are you getting the video quality you'd expect?

Sort of yes, could you guys include all of the codecs in the next version of WMP? Some of them seem to be missing.

What's the first things you'd like to see us work on some more?

All of the codecs, the amount of time it takes to load the program. Give it a seperate 'section' of the processes, for example, when running Norton A/V, WMP would not get bothered by it, and not freeze up.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Stevan Veselinovic — Thu, 20 May 2004 16:21:38 GMT

Where is the old media player that we all knew and loved?
   Maybe we should get that back instead..
         mplayer2 works the best. Always pick a non-memory-hoger.

start > run > mplayer2

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

BanjoFrog — Thu, 20 May 2004 16:41:10 GMT

How many of you with home theater PCs (not MediaCenter) actually use WMP9 to watch DVDs? I don't, simply because every time I sneeze or move on the couch, my wireless mouse wiggles and suddenly the picture shrinks, toolbars fly in, and I feel like I'm watching a movie during an earthquake. Why can't this be simpler by default?

-bf

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

GreenNinja — Thu, 20 May 2004 16:52:21 GMT

2 things quickly come to mind:

1) I agree with PaoloM that it would be nice to have something to organize codecs and to provide info about each codec (vendor name, file types it handles, version, etc.).

2) When running media from a web page via MSN Video (e.g., MSNBC videos), sometimes I get an error when starting a video. I don't remember the specific error (some C++ error), but it would be nice (and this is true for any piece of software) if the error would be informative to an average user (I am better than average, but still can't figure out some of these problems). For example, what was the software trying to do when it failed (in this case, was it trying to load a codec, initialize the environment, invoke a function in a particular dll, etc.)? What would the software developer (of the failing code) want to look at to diagnose the problem? What would the software developer want the user to do to avoid/resolve the error? Catastrophic failures should provide as much info as possible for the average person to fix the problem, if possible, or for the user to feedback to Microsoft so that the problem is fixed in the next update.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

FrankCarr — Thu, 20 May 2004 17:40:36 GMT

One simple request would be to put the 'now playing'song title information in the Start bar tooltip. MusicMatch does this and it's nice to be able to see the title/artist without having to switch tasks.

Playlist management could be better. The process of creating, modifying, selecting and saving a playlist is confusing. It should be more straight forward in this area.

Randomization of the playlist is weak and has some annoying glitches. For example, if you skip a few songs in the list when the player is paused, it goes back and plays the skipped songs when the current song is finished. The same thing happens if you jump out of the sequence.

Video-wise, I'm pretty happy with the performance there, particularly since getting a 5.1 speaker system. A slight annoyance there is that a little jiggle of the mouse brings up the full screen mode controls. It would be nice to link this to something else other than or in combination with mouse movement as an option.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Todd Spatafore — Thu, 20 May 2004 17:54:29 GMT

There are several issues that I have with WMP.

-It'd be nice if I could pause the current song, listen to something from a web page or a clip that I found on my hard drive then resume the song I was listening to.

-Randomize the playlist is nice, but it would be nice to have it play in random mode but keep the playlist sorted as found.

-(I'm sure it's there but) repeat

All in all I find the UI to be clunky. Maybe that's because I've used WinAmp for most of my life.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

clovejoy — Thu, 20 May 2004 18:27:52 GMT

Another gripe abput playlists is that you cannot print them. I don't always want to print out fancy labels or liners. Sometimes, I just want to print a simple list of title and artist..

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ChadG — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:10:51 GMT

Great feedback Neil, this is the type of information I'm eager to hear.

Clearly, multimedia performance is something we're investing a lot of effort in. Topics such as start-up latency (time it takes for a user to hear music or see video once they double click a media item), seamless switching between items of a playlist, and other topics such as resource consumption (are we being efficient with our use of CPU, disk bandwidth, & memory).

Once you get things to start playing back, does music typically playback without many glitches or other problems?

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

cwoodruff — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:19:09 GMT

Is that for XP only? I have 2K here at work so I will also try it at home on the XP Pro machine. I followed your instructions and cannot see the WMP menu selection. Thanks for the help though.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ChadG — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:21:26 GMT

OK, I'm trying to figure out this channel9 message board.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Chad Gibson, I'm working on the Windows digital media platform. As scoble mentioned in this initial post, I'm trying to get more information from the general community on Windows digital media.

I just started a blog over at MSDN: http://blogs.msdn.com/ccgibson, so I expect more fun conversation to occur over there as well.

I'm hearing some consistent messages about multimedia performance (responsiveness, latency, bulkiness, efficiency), codec installation/download, background tasks interfering with multimedia experiences, better volume control, and other assorted topics.

I'd like this initial feedback and try to ask & solicit some more focused feedback. Perhaps I'll use my blog to do this, or perhaps I'll just post some more messages here on Channel9. Thank you all for your feedback!

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ZippyV — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:57:17 GMT

- I want more codecs: DivX, Ogg Vorbis (with the possibility to encode songs with it), Real Audio/Video, Quicktime ...

- I don't like to use Media Player when I just need to hear a little sound or song.

- The 'Media Guide' sucks. There is no content whatsoever and when you want to play a video or song it opens popups and other * I don't want.
(I just tried to open such a video (shrek 2 trailer) and it gave me a script error msg).

I also want to see more wm9 content.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

sparky — Fri, 21 May 2004 01:36:04 GMT

ChadG wrote:

...and other topics such as resource consumption (are we being efficient with our use of CPU, disk bandwidth, & memory).

I have always been impressed with WMP's resource consumption. The visualizations take an amazingly low amount of CPU time for what seems to be a lot of work.

I agree with a previous post that creating playlists is somewhat non-intuitive. The auto playlists are a great feature though.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ghos — Fri, 21 May 2004 02:33:37 GMT

Its difficult to specify in WMP what needs fixing since I find it a chore to use. Nothing is really intuitve as to where to find what and do what you want. I found playlist creation difficult.
I suppose its a matter of someone creating the right skin, but I don't like any of them for WMP. They are either too big and gaudy or too small and useless. I do like the toolbar addition that XP has for WMP9 however it isn't skinnable(or theme aware), so therefore when using Windowblinds it doesn't match, nor does it match the corresponding WMP skin (which I could understand if it did that). It sticks out like a sore thumb.
I do like that it has notifications, although I can't recall if they appear on top of all windows, but do recall them being a bit small.

I agree with those who mention it is slow loading. However its a bit faster than MMJB for me (which I recently ditched, it is far too bloated and slow for me) and about the same for J. River MC, but Winamp is faster.

For me visualizations don't matter, nor a lot of the other stuff some seem to enjoy. I just like to listen to CD's, mp3's, internet radio and be able to view videos or movies from online such as the Channel 9 ones. I also generally like to keep the player out of site, using notifications to tell me of song(even though I often know it lol). WMP is very capable of playing those and I like that it can do so without opening another application. Of course that depends on the site, how its written, as some open the app.

If WMP gets a big overhaul into something that can be simpler to use, quicker to load, yet do fancy stuff for those who demand it, it will be something I might use more often. As it stands now it is only my choice for streaming videos.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

ChuckBuc — Fri, 21 May 2004 07:34:37 GMT

ChadG wrote:

I'm hearing some consistent messages about multimedia performance (responsiveness, latency, bulkiness, efficiency), codec installation/download, background tasks interfering with multimedia experiences, better volume control, and other assorted topics.

Perhaps it maybe appropriate to ask what rocks about WMP 9?… Just so we don’t loose any of those in the "fix". I think the task bar player is probably one of the most under utilized features in WMP. I’m always showing people, “here do this and the player goes to the task bar and you can continue computing.”

I think, as with most growing applications, WMP is reaching a level of configuration burden on the user. For instance the EQ adjustments and the play speed are way cool but will trash a 550 MHz AMD. Not a problem for me anymore since I shot and buried mine so no adjustment needed there. But someone upgrading their old player and not knowing that this is a CPU separator may tend to blame the app. So information may be the key.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

nektar — Fri, 21 May 2004 07:46:07 GMT

Provide keyboard shortcuts that work! Make keyboard shortcuts customizable as well if possible. Currently, the Rewind shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+B never ever works and the Jump Forward command CTRL+SHIFT+F works only for files played from the local computer but not for music played on cds or on the Internet. In addition the CTRL+SHIFT+F shortcut changes the speed of the song instead of jumping forward in it as it should. I believe that adding straight forward shortcuts to the player will assist everyone of us, since we would be able to quickly access its functionality without spending time with the mouse. Take example from the old Winamp v2's shortcuts:
z for previous song, x for play, c for pause, v for stop, ctrl+v for stop after current song (something that WMP does not support!), shift+v for fading out (something that is not easy to do in WMP!), b for next song, j for jumping to a song by typing the beginning of its name (very handy!), cursor right for forward, left for rewind, up for volume up and down for volume down.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

nektar — Fri, 21 May 2004 07:55:06 GMT

We discussed Media Player improvement before on Channel9.
From: How should Media Player be improved?
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3981#3981

Support for more formats: Since WMP is provided with every copy of Windows it should by default support most popular formats for streaming, playback and ripping cds and not simply what Microsoft offers. Also developers would be greatly assisted in their own programs if the standard Windows codex could support most of the major formats for playback. Currently, WMP only supports ripping to WMA. I think it should support wav, mp3, aac and if possible Real Audio. Ripping cds to wav is very useful to my mind and should be added. Since most sound editing programs accept the wav format whilst support for wma is not so high still and if not using lossless WMA the sound quality also degrates, wav should be supported by all means. In addition Windows should include codex that playback aac format, Quicktime video, mp4 video and if possible streaming Real Audio/Video in addition to the current support. And if all these formats should appear to some to be very costly for Microsoft, it should be pointed out that Real Player v10 currently supports all of them and even more with extra plugins and it is still free. So, the only reason for Microsoft to continue only supporting WMA for ripping and for streaming over the Internet and not supporting aac, Real Audio/Video streaming, ripping to wav, etc, appears to be to push its own WMA/WMV format. Without saying that WMA is not a good format, since WMP ships with every copy of Windows it should at least support a bit more.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Rolus — Fri, 21 May 2004 13:52:08 GMT

First I want to list what I like about WMP9

The Streaming Video is much better than QuickTime running on my XP machine. This could be amn Apple vs PC thing as far as programming goes because WMP was pretty poor on my Mac.

I have been using iTunes since it was released for PC, I have to say it is pretty good. When I rip CD's for my iPod they sound great, when I use WMP I get skipping, weird souns etc. So I think iTunes wins for free Ripping/Burning software.

For internet TV and Streaming Audio I use the New WinAmp 5. They have it right, it's small and uses very little system resources, when I tried to use either iTunes, or WMP, with VS.Net open I got stalls, crashes and generally poor performance both from VS.Net and the players. WinAmp is my Choice for Streaming Audio.

When I watched my friend put together a home movie using iMovie, I was a bit jealous. Not because of the ease of use, which I think that WMM comes close on; The SPEED of his iMac was impressive when doing his home movies, and the Quality was quite good. I know I couldn't do the same thing with my P4, without a lot of tweaking, restarting and cajoling. For Media creation it's a whole other OS, Mac wins in this category! .

So WMP people, go over to the MAC BU at Microsoft observe on what they do well, then do better!

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Epsi — Fri, 21 May 2004 23:26:30 GMT

My pet peeve is that if I have a data DVD or CD or something in the drive, and i quickly start up WMP, and hit the little drop-down box next to minimise to start up "All Music", the whole WMP UI locks up while the DVD drive tries to recognise the disc that's in there and it's really annoying.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Slartibartfast — Sat, 22 May 2004 02:08:10 GMT

Just a silly comment, but still an issue.

Why does the chosen skin determine the maximum size you can scale the video to? I can see a lot of technical reasons, but no practical ones, from the users' point of view.

I've ended up using the gray "blob" skin, even though it frankly looks like s**t.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

stevex — Sat, 22 May 2004 04:10:23 GMT

Here are the killers for me.

- Windows Media Player is slow. When I double-click on a video file that's on my local machine, it can take 3 or 4 seconds before it starts playing the first time. Seriously, what's going on here? Other media players don't have this problem. It's frustrating.

- The automatic codec downloading needs to support third party codecs. If I want to look at a video I found on a website, I shouldn't need to know what codec I need to install; WMP should be able to figure that out and install it.

- (Windows in general..) When I'm using my PC as a media player, I need a way of making everything else in the OS stay quiet. I used my laptop to play video and audio for a live production and I was SO afraid that something was going to pop up a reminder that I need to register, or something like that, while I was 'live'.

On the system I'm using (a Thinkpad T41, 1.4 Ghz centrino with a gig of RAM) I just invoked WMP. It showed up in about 3 seconds. I went to the Media Library and clicked on a song that's on my local system. It took EIGHT SECONDS before it started playing.

If you're not seeing this in your testing, then you need to figure out why not, because your customers are.

- Steve

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Mike Dimmick — Sun, 23 May 2004 11:18:51 GMT

I notice a lot of people complaining about poor performance when ripping CDs. Typically, this is due to the CD drive being in Programmed I/O (PIO) mode rather than in Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode. Windows XP seems to default to PIO. To change, go to Device Manager (devmgmt.msc), bring up Properties on the IDE channel your CD drive is connected to (normally under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers > Secondary IDE Controller) and look at the Advanced tab. Make sure all the options are set to 'DMA if available'.

PIO mode requires using processor cycles to explicitly copy from an I/O port to a memory location, and modern processors pretty much suck at I/O port manipulation (since they don't have to do it that often - almost every device in your computer uses DMA). DMA works by having the IDE controller steal bus cycles.

If you don't have an Advanced tab, you may have installed an alternate IDE driver. I did this on this machine because the hard disk was only detected at UDMA Mode 0 (16Mbps transfers) rather than Mode 5, ATA-100. See the driver's documentation for details on configuration. If your CD drive can't do DMA, it's ancient and you should replace it.

For general system performance with Windows, you need a fast hard drive. Look for a disk with ATA/100 or 133 bus transfer speed and a 7200rpm spindle speed, and at least 2MB on-drive buffer cache. True A/V disks are normally SCSI with 10k or 15krpm spindle speed. I'm a fan of IBM/Hitachi DeskStar drives.

Unfortunately many OEMs skimp on this and give you cruddy 5400 or even 4500 rpm drives, but still quote ATA/133. Fast bus transfer speed is no use if the drive can't actually suck the bits off the disk at that speed.

Oh, and make sure your CD drive isn't on the same channel as your hard drive, if using IDE. IDE can't address both drives on the same channel simultaneously: once a command is sent to a drive, no commands can be sent to the other drive until the first drive responds. SCSI has multiple simultaneous access - commands can be pending on multiple devices simultaneously.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

lars — Sun, 23 May 2004 18:29:36 GMT

I'm fighting an uphill battle to use the old unskinned media player (mplayer2.exe). WMP9 has a mind of it's own and has a tendency to "steal" back the extension associations. Drives me nuts. I'm an old dog and WMP9 is a new trick.

I don't want skins. At all. Period.

Something that annoys me alot about WMP9 is that the spacebar does not PAUSE the movie anymore. Believe it or not, but that is a deal breaker for me right there. When I watch a movie on my HTPC in a dark room I want to be easy to pause.

I don't like the way it sometimes goes out on the net to find CODECs that is already installed. It attempts to find a codec, fails, and then plays the movie anyway. Totally whack.

I'd like to find a way to get WMP to play full screen no matter if it loses focus. I've got dual monitors and I'd like to be able to run full screen on one of the monitors and work with applications on the other. Right now it leaves full screen mode if I start working with something else on the other monitor.

MPEG2 playback has to be included. I don't care if you give me the "this is a free product" speech. Sometimes it's a free product, and sometimes it a part of the OS. As an end user - I don't really care.
If WMP doesn't cut it, I'll use another player. It's as easy as that. (No disrespect intended.)

/Lars.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

vinil — Tue, 25 May 2004 13:30:40 GMT

I can't help comparing WMP with JetAudio. Some of the features that I like about JetAudio are:
1. Playlist mgmt, I can set JetAudio to play media (be it videos (most formats, including realmedia), songs (again all formats including realmedia) (it also pops up rtf/txt lyric files), midi (my brother uses the PC to mix music, so he has midi playlists) and streaming media

In fact, since I've started to use Win2K3 as my dev. machine, I have enabled streaming server and put my playlists as publish points. I like this way of managing my playlists (since i used to put my playlists on the desktop, and then one fine day, when bootup becomes slow and my profile becomes bloated, had to move all the files from desktop into c:\desktopAsOnSomeFineDay and lo! all my playlists are lost...) And, the playlist editor bundled with the MediaServer ROCKS!!! The only grudge--no RealMedia or QT support (

2. Recording from any of the ports (line-in/mic) and applying a codec to it

3. Recording from streaming media

4. Ctrl+Shift+P pauses/starts my song irrespective of the app I am in. I don't need to switch to JetAudio.

5. A very neat functional interface (not that it matters much

Now, what I like about WMP. mplayer2 simply is an awesome video player! Its speed is amazing!!!

The toolbar trick is neat in WMP9.

Now coming to the "Media" experience.

One thing which will improve the entire user experience would be to bring the experience on the PC atleast upto the TV level, Which means getting rid of the blocky playback and lagged dialogues.
WMP could have an internal measure of the fps and the playback delay, and then pop up to the user (again configurable) and suggest that you could have a better experience watching this video, if you would disable some unnecessary services like the themes service, the Computer Browser service etc. (I mean unnecessary system hogs) and free up resources.

And, if enough resources are available, it can increase the resolution, or change the sampling rate etc. (basically try and collect data intelligently and make the experience better). Of course, the user should be able to configure these, since I personally would want to know what kind of decisions are being made by my media player to give me a better playback.

Another thing I have observed with most media players is their reluctance to relinquish the multi-media resources they have acquired. It pains me no end to wait for the screen to return to normal, after I click the close button on a movie window. It should be fast, and not make me regret the decision to close the window instead of restarting my computer (the computer in question is a P-II MMX (166 MHz) with 48 MB RAM, 2.1 G HDD), yes guys, those machines are still out there in hordes, and people do want to watch "Lord of the Rings" on DVDs on those machines running Win98)

Hmm... Is that all? I will check my neurons for more,
In the meantime,
Regards,
Vinil

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

BinaryBoy — Sat, 29 May 2004 09:20:21 GMT

Ah. This hits home. My software finds and downloads movies and other files from Usenet and one thing that really burns people up is when they download a 100MB avi file only to find that Windows Media Player can't find the codec. Has WMP ever found any codec for anyone ever? I've never seen it happen.

Second problem is the ever so fragile avi format itself. Unlike with mpeg files, if just one part of the avi file is damaged or missing, the entire thing becomes unplayable. With mpegs, users are able to download the first part of the file, play it to preview it and then decide whether they want to download the whole thing. The mpeg format can be as torn up as a block of swiss cheese blasted by shotgun and it will continue to work as long as the first part exists.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

OldManCoyote — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 23:41:58 GMT

Some of the issues that I've experienced:

1. No support for alternate video/audio codecs; one usually has to download them prior to start the media item. My favorites are: Gordian Knot (Divx/XviD) found at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gordianknot/ There are at leased 40+ out there that should be supported. Some are under the GNU/GPL, but can be offered if the library is not altered (DLL) and no charge is incurred.

2. The 2-3 second delay (as discribed above).

3. Integration into Explorer (a bug): When on an alternate drive (using a Promise, HotPoint etc. ATA-133 extention card), the IE will lockup when hovering over a media item it doesn't like. Because of the 'integration' with media playing into Explorer I have no choice but always to preview it if I where to hover over it or select it. I usually avoid using WMP 9.x at all costs on any extension ATA-133 cards.

4. The bogus skin: why don't you guys do a proper skinning job on it. WinAmp, FreeAmp, etc. all have decent rendering and drag-able skins. WMP has his bogus skin, that hides its TLW frame. I'd say skin it all, or don't bother skinning it.

(I use to make mp3 players for living btw.)

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

OldManCoyote — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 23:43:58 GMT

5. Oh, and why does it require 18.5 meg of memory to play a simple 128Kbps, 44.1Khz mp3 file? Bogus!

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

AndyC — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 22:29:51 GMT

Well the #1 gripe with the audio experience on Windows today has to be the fact that you seem to need half a dozen different media player applications and then each one seems to insist on becoming your preferred player without actually asking you.

Aside from that, I'd really like to be able to have playlists based on the type of music without having to hand create them. Being able to say "I want to listen to some classical music" or "I want something loud and angry" would be really cool.

And one last thing while I'm ranting, what is it about media player applications that means they all have to be "skinned"? I find it distracting having something that stands out so prominantly on the desktop (Realplayer, Quicktime, Winamp and WMP are all guilty of this). Grrrrr...

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

bigboss12085 — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 08:40:23 GMT

My biggest issue with mediaplayer is the license system for copy protected music. I know I was dumb enough to make all my music copy protected when I first backed it up off CD, but now I find that every few months or so I'm having to reformat my drive and when I do, I always, and I mean always have problems updating the licenses after reinstalling windows.

am I the only one??

p.s. incase its a point of interest for anyone, the machine I use as a main/test machine is:
400MHz PII
256MB RAM
60GB hd
4MB ATi onboard gfx
onboard sound
onboard lan
intel 56k modem
winxp pro sp-2

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

OldManCoyote — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 20:21:39 GMT

bigboss12085 wrote:

My biggest issue with mediaplayer is the license system for copy protected music. I know I was dumb enough to make all my music copy protected when I first backed it up off CD, but now I find that every few months or so I'm having to reformat my drive and when I do, I always, and I mean always have problems updating the licenses after reinstalling windows.

I'd have to agree. After years of listen and comparing with mp3 and wma, I'd have to say wma does win on overall frequency responce in its codec.

But the overall usability of wma with its reconcilable integration of its DRM will eventually kill the format. Why go to the trouble of ripping all of your music library, when its 'bound' to that perticular hardware PC setup and OS. One can't even copy it over to an alternate home PC, let alone the Media Center, without it become inopperable.

The DRM free formats will win in the long run, such as Ogg, AAC, mp3, etc.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

eddwo — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 23:31:52 GMT

This is quite funny, you're asking a question and not getting the answers you expect.

Most people have complained about UI issues, about Codec support and slowness in loading, not about audio or video "glitches" during playback.

The reported plans for Longhorn include a new initiative for "glitch-free" media playback, this includes changes to the kernels scheduler to allocate fixed amounts of CPU time to particular processes and also involves changes to the driver model. This seems to me to be a pretty drastic change to make to critical parts of the system for fairly marginal benifits, and from the feedback so far it seems not to be a high priority. I know Avalon will make it a lot easier to include video playback in applications, so chances are people will have several programs using video at the same time but I am still to be convinced that such drastic changes are necessary,

Longhorn is also set to include a new Universal Audio Architecture http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/audio/UAA.mspx
which, if this screenshot is to be believed, will enable you to set different volume levels on a per-application basis.
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/lh-winhec-02.png
So the problem of Outlook blasting out when you turn the volume up to listen to music should be solved.

Linux now has ALSA http://www.alsa-project.org/ and OSX has Core Audio http://developer.apple.com/audio/coreaudio.html so it's about time Windows had a similar centralised audio architecture.

The codec situation is pretty poor I agree. For some reason REAL and Apple seem to have refused to make codecs compatible with DirectShow, the centralised media architecture in windows, and so require their own seperate players. Personally I think all players ought to be able to play all formats and Windows should include codecs for Real and Quicktime as the most popular internet formats, in much the same way as it includes support for Macromedia flash. There should also be a service similar to the file extension lookup service that tells you which codec you need and where to download it, for codecs that Microsoft cannot legally provide. Also DVD playback should be supported out of the box, i know there are licensing issues there as well, but surely it wouldn't be more than a couple of doller per copy of windows, a price that could easily be absorbed. At the moment you can download an avi and WMP will not be able to locate a codec, but there is no easy way of finding out even what codec it was looking for.

As far as ripping goes I now use iTunes for ripping MP3s and Rio Manager for creating oggs for my Rio Karma. I think WMP didn't include a MP3 encoder initially because of licensing costs from Fraunhoffer but iTunes now provides an MP3 encoder for free wheras WMP requires an add on pack. I do think its pretty stupid that WMP by default use DRM on the WMAs it creates, seriously who wants to place restrictions on their own audio from their own CDs? It only causes problems with licenses and interoperability. It is an optional setting but enough people have not realised it was enabled and have gotten stuck with loads of their own audio they cannot playback anymore.

Also WMP calls all my DVDs "Unknown DVD", possibly because they are all Region 2 and not recognised by whatever database it is looking up in, but I think if the feature is there it ought to offer international support.

Fullscreen playback ought to support multimonitors properly.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

intelman — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:06:58 GMT

I dont know if its software that makes multimedia on the pc suck, its getting the content. Sometimes streaming videos just aren't as high of quality that I like (Windows Media 9 streaming system actually seems to be nice). Another thing is hardware, I wish 20+ inch monitors were afordable. As you mentioned, sometimes anti virus software will scan while watching a movie, usually it is unaffected by the scan, but sometimes a interruption can be noticed.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Shining Arcanine — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:32:07 GMT

scobleizer wrote:

What's the first things you'd like to see us work on some more?

Codec support. I'd like to see default support for DivX, Quicktime, Real, MPEG-4, etc. Please don't ask me what codecs are represented by etc as it is meant to mean every codec that I didn't specify.

I'd like to see the ability to minimize to the system tray. The taskbar real estate that WMP uses has always bothered me and I don't want to have it taken up by WMP when I'm doing mutitasking and want to listen to music when I'm doing it.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Willem Meints — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 09:43:46 GMT

I got a rather fast PC:

P4 2800 MHz hyperthreading
512 MB memory
160 GB harddisk
Geforce FX 5600

But still some parts are going slow
I can't play some games on a resonable speed when all the beauty options are turned on...
It seems like the vga-cards aren't used as optimal as they could. Most companies say they support hardware rendering, but I haven't seen a game yet that uses that option completely :\

Is it the documentation, or is it just the people that make the game??

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

DonnyEMU — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 22:38:47 GMT

Hmm, I came to the PC in 1993-1994 from the Amiga platform, here's what I miss in terms of PC multimedia stuff that I had in the "old days"..

1) Better interoperability between media types and software.. I keep finding all of these cool tools out there and figuring out that I don't have the right codec installed, or I am not sure of the capabilities of the CODEC I have installed (can I really encode an MP3 at 320??), without some deep examination. in some tool that has no standard interface (like Gspot).

I think the interface to codecs needs to get exposed as a control panel item, so I can control the codecs, on the machine, know what capabilities I have what I have installed. Right now it's up to programs to tell me this, but there is no standard way to know this kind of information (though it exists internally in the system and is easy for programmers to get at.)...

The media player interface to me now hides way too much information from the user. It's now more aimed at people playing back media more than it is people using it to create new media.. I think there needs to be a better balance there between playback and DRM, and what you can do to create media with your machine in the UI.

Right now it seems quite stiffled with you just seeing all the DRM stuff in there and the advertising..

The Amiga/EA did something right called IFF (an old set of interchangable file standards). I wish today there was a more "Generic" windows set of file formats across the board for portability of files.. Example: In addition to Photoshop for instance saving a PSD format there was a " windows layered bitmap format"..

Build an open api that lets you install file formats for loading and saving and installing and removing codecs into the OS that's exposed to the user in a more standard way, that 3rd party ISVs and everyone can support (even people doing vbscripting). If it's already in there (::wink: open it more up to the user.. I would like to see an API that allows someone to say install a JPEG "loader/saver" that works with every program you could install in the operating system accross the board. It becomes a system capability, not a dll that works with some programs and not others (a system wide plug-in so to speak)..

So if companies wanted their own file format standards they could still have it, just give them another saver format for portability between windows applications (maybe something based on XML).. 3D meshes today is a good example of something needing a "common format". But not a "limited" format, it needs to be something extensible..

Everything is way too propietary with file formats today (3d objects, bitmaps, etc.) and the file converters rarely do a perfect job of rendering from one format to the next. I think Microsoft would be doing a good thing to support both industry standards and "meta" standards that would allow people to move data across formats while in windows more easily. Not just the kind you find in Office today..

With WinFX/Avalon/Aero, this other stuff needs to get exposed too. Leave it open for 3rd parties to add on as they see fit. Publish this and make it available OUTSIDE of MSDN even..

I also miss a general purpose media authoring tool. We have movie maker, but I want something to author with (buttons, UI, etc).. Apple has always had hypercard in the past, the Amiga had Amigavision.. Why not integrate media types and create a general media integration tool.. It would empower windows users to do more with their systems..

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Ovidiu.Platon — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:55:28 GMT

My main complaint about Windows Media Player would be its performance (especially the working set).

I used Winamp from version 0.x to this day. What I particularly enjoy about it is the fact that it really allows you to "pay as you go". In Winamp 5, if I disable all the shiny features, I get a working set as small as the one in v1 or v2.xx (I can prove that with vadump logs or perfmon logs if you wish).

That never happened with WMP (I'm still evaluating v10 though). V9 sucked big time, it's painful to get rid of all the useless shiny features and you get no real benefit, the working set is about the same.

The second complaint would be about usability. Previous posters have made a good job complaining about this so I won't do it again.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

LCARS — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 13:08:49 GMT

As far as WMP goes.... One of my biggest problems has been the default "Fullmode" interface.

There doesn't seem to be any standard for laying out the interface. It kinda seems like they just threw a bunch of buttons on there.

I think that the program relies a bit too much on menus. Anytime I need to go do something useful (like open a media file or access a playlist) I have to go menu diving.

I did a rough count and found around 29 menus! And they were all under some obscure button!

Don't get me wrong, I think WMP is a great program. It just needs some interface improvements.

Also, better support for adding/editing playlists would be great. Maybe consider adding in smart playlists? And of course a more intuitive interface for managing them!

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

dentaku — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 13:41:30 GMT

- Well, the obvious thing is to make it simple for people to get the right codecs when they need it. Non-technical people have no clue what a codec is and they shouldn't be given some obscure error when the player encounters a file it can't play.
I know it will never be able to play Real and .mov files but it wuld be SO nice if Media Player could. I HATE Real Player and Quicktime isn't much better.

- DVD support out of the box is just something people expect form a pay built into the OS. Try to explain to someone why they need to install something like WinDVD before Media Player can play a DVD.

- If you click on a link in Media Player's GUIDE tab (I rarely even look in there but I don't mind that it exists, I guess) it will sometimes open a website in the background and "take over" the webpage you just had open. It really should open a new browser window first. I guess that has more to do with how the people who designed the site that you see embedded in Media Player than the player itself.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Quethrosar — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:28:00 GMT

WMP for smartphone needs better fast forward and rewind especially when watching something bigger then 10 minutes like a movie. Currently it fast forwards at maybe 2x speed.

WMP for desktop needs support for the codecs that are on the smartphone camera. This is pathetic that you need to download codecs to watch videos recorded on the smartphone. How would i send movies to say my family who has no idea about codecs?

Let me resize DRM protected files. There is no reason you couldn't implement the syncing in WMP to reapply the drm to a smaller bit rate version of the file.

Ship with DIVX and XVID codecs or at least have them on the codecs download list when the player checks for codecs.

The 5 second freeze of controls when starting something playing needs to be fixed.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Reddragon — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 03:32:47 GMT

I saw this post, immediatley registed and came out of three months of just watching the forums and videos (they're great!) from the outside.

- An easy way to deal with and organize codecs for non-native .avi encodes (divx, xvid, h.264, ac3)
- An easy way to deal with wrappers(?) like ogm and mkv

I know that you can go through things like hardware audio and video properties dialogues but an easy clear place in the WMP prefrences would be great.

And two more:
- A menu bar for compact mode. (not that right click stuff)
- an option to have that time tracker - for lack of a better word - dissapear faster in full screen

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Seldomly — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 06:09:45 GMT

I use a Mac and have WMP 9 installed. Many times video content on web sites just doesn't work. Quicktime content always works (as might be expected), but a lot of content from news sites is in Windows Media format--which is fine with me, I don't really care, as long as it will play. When files can be downloaded to disk, WMP can usually handle them OK, but a lot of content seems to rely on some funky scripts that don't work. Or something. "Media Player not found." "Wrong file type" "Can not play this content" Blah, blah, blah. Naturally, the webmasters don't have time to solve "your problem", but I don't really have time to solve "their problem", either. OK, so that's what sucks about my audio and video experience--it's not having one at all!

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

yyy — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:18:52 GMT

One of the most annoying things is streaming. I really like Windows Media Player, but when it comes to streaming it isn't as good as Real Player. For some reason, when I use Real Player the video barely stops working. But when using Windows Media player, the video tends to stop for a few seconds for buffering and then continue.

My Internet conection is a quite fast ADSL broadband connection but I don't think it's the problem. I wish WMP could stream media without stopping too often, like Real Player does.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

RuneSpyder — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 19:53:24 GMT

I have a simple request.

Follow the standard "Previous Track" functionality that is present everywhere else in the world. When I first press "previous" while something is playing, it should go back to the beginning of the currently playing title. If I press it again within a couple of seconds, it should then go to the previous track.

Yeah, I know I can drag the progress pointer all the way to the left to accomplish the same thing, but it's not the standard.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

DigitalDud — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 06:58:59 GMT

I'd like to be able to play Channel 9 videos on my laptop without the fan throttling up. I tried the Vista beta and it seems to be making strides to keeping the CPU usage down (my fan is idle watching Channel 9) although it also messes up lots of video codecs. But yeah, whatever you're doing to improve video performance in Vista, keep doing it.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

JohnAskew — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:42:55 GMT

Live Meeting WebCasts -- live internet -- has audio and video out of sync too much. Also, high pitched female voices cause distortion of the audio, a fluttering sound.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Comic Strip Blogger — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:53:12 GMT

Lack of native support for pooch stir G - in Win Media Player and in Active Sync. that's what sucks for me about Multimedia in Win XP,