Windows Media Player 12 Sucks

With Windows 7 just out , Windows Media Player 12 is slowly making its way onto PCs everywhere, replacing outdated version of a software mane – including me – haven’t really had much love for. Considering the amount of people using default applications, and WMP12′s ability to use Windows 7 features out of the box, I decided to take a closer look.

Media Library - Music, Video, Photo Library

WMP12 supports the Windows 7 library feature, which means that by default it will look for media in the music/video/photo library folder – which is a virtual folder made up by multiple user defined folders from various places on the computer. This means that the music consolidation is handled by the OS, not the music program, and that again means you can manually tinker with the files and still have everything in (seemingly) one place.

Features

Windows Media Player 12 supports most popular video and audio formats. This includes video formats like 3GP, AAC, AVCHD, MPEG-4, WMV, and WMA. It also supports most AVI, DivX, MOV, and Xvid files! It thus supports more formats than WMP 11 but it comes bundled together with windows 7.You can however download it separately for Windows 7 N and Windows 7 KN.

There is also a new “Play To” feature that lets you stream music and video to other computers running Windows 7 or any other compatible device at home! With Remote Media Streaming, you can also enjoy music or videos on your computer at home from the road.

Performance

The last music playback program I tried was pretty much not usable on a slower computer due to it being very demanding on system resources. WMP12 is not, by any means. WMP12 ran fine on a 1.33Ghz netbook under-clocked to 800Mhz (power save mode) while it was syncing to my Sony player, playing music and with Photoshop running. At no point in the testing of the program did I come across lag caused by WMP12, which is simply very very good considering the slow system I tried it on.

Why it sucks

Why does the Windows 7 media player suck so bad? I mean it really blows! You can’t search or arrange songs according to their rating anymore. The interface is just poor, and everything just seems out of place and cluttered! And don’t get me started on the Skins! And they should really consider doing something with Zune. What the hell was Microsoft thinking?

WMP 12 does not allow multiple window to open simultaneously. What? On visualisation panel you can only choose between visualisation or album art. The visualisation panel is so big, but useless. I mean, when you choose battery visual, you can see the album art. Why microsoft so stupid that they leave the panel to waste? When will they learn from cool media player like Winamp?

WMP 12 does not even support *.srt format subtitle! Come on! It's already 2011 and you don't even have functions like subtitles or lyrics? What are you?

Rating

Interface : 2/5
Performance : 3/5
Features : 3/5
Playability : 3/5
User Friendly : 2/5
Worthy : 0.5/5 (Windows is so expensive. Better use Winamp lol)

Reference

http://anythingbutipod.com/2009/10/windows-media-player-12-review/
http://techblissonline.com/windows-media-player-12/
http://www.windows7com.com/why-does-windows-media-player-12-for-windows-7-suck/