Charles - Any Word On Interviews With The Media Player 12 Team? | The Coffeehouse

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

OUCH!

Was WindowsMedia Player 12 seconds away from ruining years of tagging?

I added my library folder to WMP12. A few hours later I get an error that the library is corrupt and that there is a "fix". And since there was no help button the fix sounded like it was about to rewrite all my album art at 200x200. Was it talking about the folder.jpg...or was it about to ruin years of tagging clean/large album art into my music.

This is getting pathetic.

androidi

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 26th @ 9:38 AM

Would be nice to know why the WMP team thinks they have some business in modifying user files by default. I got bit by this by misinterpreting some feature and bunch of files were enlarged. Quite annoying if one's idea of collection is one where you put something in and then it's 50 years later bit identical and the modified date is 50 years ago. It's quite a bit of work to have to use robocopy instead of explorer and uncheck bunch of boxes in WMP to get what any normal user expects from a library/collection/archive where everything is preserved just as if it was on a cd-rom but in HDD instead. Also really annoying is that NTFS doesn't tell you if the HDD is doing silent corruption so by the time one realizes it there's already a lot of damage unless you use raid and I don't really want to.

I think anyone who had ratings, id3v2 tags and such being inserted without realizing it into their files by WMP is eligible for damages.

To me the default settings should put the whatever wmp metadata into ntfs stream or other appropriate mechanism for attaching data to the file without modifying it.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to androidi

#Oct 26th @ 3:54 PM

Yeah, I had that problem with WMP for a while, I figured it was just easier to mark all my MP3s as Read-only to prevent changes being made, and it worked.

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to W3bbo

#Oct 26th @ 4:06 PM

Still figuring out who to talk to, exactly. Fear not, brothers and sisters. We will take your questions directly to the source!

C

CreamFilling512

In reply to Blue Ink

#Oct 24th @ 7:01 AM

From what I understand MOV is just a container like AVI and there could be any number of codecs inside it, which may or may not be supported.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to Charles

#Oct 26th @ 6:12 PM

Thx Charles.

Can't remember the last time I feared using a piece of software Smiley

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to W3bbo

#Oct 26th @ 4:06 PM

Same here. Neither WMP nor Media Center get to touch the metadata in any of my music files. It's annoying that you have to throw up these usability hurdles yourself in order to not have WMP destroy your stuff.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 26th @ 8:10 PM

I can. I still do, actually.

Whenever I open Virtualbox and then VirtualPC my system gets a BSOD caused by a driver installed by VirtualPC.

It's a genuine concern: the two shortcuts are right next to each other in my program menu, it's hard to avoid clicking on one and triggering a stop error.

Blue Ink
C you

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Oct 26th @ 6:30 PM

Yes, I agree that since MOV is a container, we can say that WMP handles MOV just fine (as PaoloM pointed out) and that, since it can contain media encoded with arbitrary codecs, expecting WMP to be able to play any possible MOV file simply does not make sense.

While this is technically correct, I would propose a more pragmatic approach: the QuickTime format can require arbitrary codecs, but the QuickTime player comes with a well-defined set of codecs out of the box. So, IMHO, a possible benchmark would be that WMP handles MOV reasonably well the day it achieves parity with QT without add-ons.

I don't know if this makes sense to you...

exoteric
I : Next<I>

In reply to Bas

#Oct 27th @ 1:38 AM

Whoa! I was not aware that WMP actively changes the files it plays! Scared

Speaking of libraries and media players. Is there a solution to the Windows 7 problem of adding network folders to libraries? It's a pretty hefty limitation if your media collection resides on a NAS which I'd assume is quite common nowadays. [edit: maybe that's just an RC limitation although RC was supposedly feature complete and this is a pretty important feature]

n4cer

In reply to Bas

#Oct 24th @ 2:48 AM

If you add the high-res art to each album's folder as a file named folder.jpg, Media Center should cache the high-res images for use in its interface.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to n4cer

#Oct 27th @ 6:30 PM

Hmm, thanks, I'll give it a shot.