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 native frontend APIs. The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily, and probably LLMs know way better how to deal with a react app than an UML one.
Perhaps the AI boom will encourage / subsidize(?) native development in a way? If it can be made more approachable, then maybe it would become more prevalent...
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.
A problem in isolation this is not, however. Large portions of Windows now have this same bloat in terms of executable filesize, runtime needed for basic functions, and RAM usage. Windows Media Player by itself might not be an issue, but it's part of a trend that now affects Explorer, Desktop Window Manager, and a bunch of other core components to the operating system.
Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.
Considering the way Microsoft's product line is these days, I have a hard time believing its terabytes of "telemetry" go anywhere but the Windows equivalent of /dev/null.
If all apps are developed with the same mindset, all of them would consume much more memory. Does the average user have a 3x buffer just in case? I doubt the median-ish 8GB is enough these days.
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.
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.
I don’t want a trillion dollar investment in ram reduction, but the fist 80% of optimisation will be trivially achieved. Microsoft have a conflict of interest given they also sell surface devices where pushing people to the more expensive models is beneficial, while also probably benefiting when other hardware manufacturers benefit too.
Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.
Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit.
Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.
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.
Chrome does it, so it must be good? Is a extra 200mb going to cause the computer to choke? probably not, but that doesn't mean people cant complain about the fact that a lot of modern software has gone this route and it all does add up.
I really only enjoyed Windows Media Player for its visualizations. I found that VLC could get close, but not quite an exact match (most likely due to licensing); there's something quite entrancing about them, and how they'd move in time and change with the music.
It's come and gone, and I'm still not fully sure what Groove Music was; was it something to do with the Zune?
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 assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
> 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.
Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
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…
I feel you - the most annoying thing about this sort of bloat is just not being able to keep up with or identify everything that's running. Don't get me wrong, this can be a problem on MacOS or Linux, but it feels much more manageable in a *nix environment even though I grew up with DOS/windows.
I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building.
The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.
Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.
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.
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”.
It does not matter how well or poorly Chrome mismanages memory, 400MB is still 400MB. If that 400MB is 10% of the free RAM after the share the OS takes, then that is a hefty toll. And the regular updates Windows 11 users are getting are famously not providing value, but taking value away. Case in point right here is the new media player.
Windows Server 2022 comes up just fine in 4-8GB RAM disposable qubes. I can easily load Adobe MCCS6 applications in that. I can run Mathematica in that. I can load Siemens NX 10-12 in that and do basic modeling!
And you're running windows media player on these? I doubt that, so entirely unrelated to the fact that windows 11 does not, which is the OS the vibecoded slop media player is gonna be used on.
> This new software replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player across all Windows 11 PCs.
A single Chrome tab does not use gigabytes. In fact, this app IS a Chrome tab! It's web based, so it's using Edge, which is just Chrome in a trenchcoat.
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!
That would actually be like taxing or regulating the code itself, which could be pretty straightforward in proportion to its size and resource wastage.
I just think taxes have proven to be highly nonideal unless they are levied against some added-value being realized, but you're giving me ideas.
You could perhaps partially tax based on value too, but it could start to get confusing and unfair again.
Either way, taxes would probably turn out to be more of a parasite in terms of how it can overwhelm the value added if levies rise far beyond relative insignificance. Regardless of what good might come of it on the surface looking at the code.
The code itself is already regulated anyway, I would rather see a minor adjustment to the regulation where only code in an open-standard low-level language can be copyrighted.
You wouldn't even need to add enough taxes for negative incentive if the higher-level stuff was set free, that would unleash incredible resources.
That might be one of the most effective ways to reverse the exponential increase in resource-hogging, with greatest urgency.
Couldn't do it overnight, probably have to roll it back against a timeline, one layer at a time. Simulate the reversal of the metastization as logically as can be done from this point.
There's just no way we should have ever needed more than 100mb of C: drive space as long as you wanted to run your office with no further features than Windows 95 with Office 97. To be generous another 100mb for multimedia and another 100 for internet, plus the OS and Microsoft apps are supposed to get more efficient from there since they were rushed to market in the '90's themselves.
Gigabytes were supposed to be for storage and media files, and there was never supposed to be any latency of any kind as soon as processors got up to 1GHz and you got off dial-up. Mice with balls were all that was necessary too, and that was with IDE HDDs.
If Google and Apple also decided to remove support for common video formats instead of just paying the slightly higher licensing fee, I might have some sympathy.
Microsoft thinks they have all the money in the world when it comes to wasting huge sums on mergers and acquisitions that go nowhere. Spend some on maintaining the user experience.
Also, with Dell and others releasing new Windows laptops with 8 Gigs of RAM, needless memory bloat is unacceptable.
I believe, at this point they could direct AI to vibe rewrite every UI code written after 2010 in Win32 and MFC and the result would still be vastly better than crap they push us nowadays.
>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.
As an operating system vendor, it should be a dismissable offence to refuse to use the OS standard APIs. Your products need to be the standard that other try to imitate.
> 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.
How do we live in a world where simultaneously "human coding is dead" and also "we need to trade performance for developer efficiency"? I thought code is free now?
Also--this is Microsoft! It's their OS!
Microsoft should just come out and say that the whole of Win32 is deprecated and kept around for legacy compatibility only, and all new software should be written in Electron. They're already acting that way, why not make it official?
> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily
Ah yes, we don't want Microsoft to run out of JavaScript developers to keep improving their desktop operating system in this manner. More webdevs, that's what's going to fix what ails Windows!
> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps
I mean, I agree, but Microsoft of all companies really should be invested in building Windows native applications. If they can't be fucked to build Windows-native applications, why would anyone else?
Microsoft should be setting the example, and the high bar of what Windows-native quality software should be. It's frankly embarrassing for them that they can't or won't do it.
HEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.
It's not about the code. The open source implementations are also subject to patent laws, they just ignore them and put the responsibility on the user. And users don't know/care about it so in the end they get playback for free.
That is why some distributions (RHEL derivatives, for example) do not ship support for many codecs out of the box and they make you jump to (admittedly simple) hoops to get it working.
x265 is an encoder, not a decoder. Also, being open source doesn't matter here: an open source library, even with a patent grant, doesn't give you a license to someone else's patents.
Windows 11 is not free software. Apple macOS, iOS, ipadOS all support HEVC and Dolby because Apple pays licensing costs, likewise Microsoft should do the same for Windows users, it is not free OS.
It’s been a few years since I tried but I think the codec support was pretty bad last time I checked. Sure it can play MOV files, but every time I tried to throw some pirated video at it it would choke.
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.
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.
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 thought out.
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. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!)
2. it's not "after"; Groove Music was largely written in 2014-2017 in the early Windows 10 days, and even its rebrand as Media Player in Windows 11 happened in 2022, and it's barely been touched since then.
There isn't even really a barrier. It's not actually hard to do UIs in WinForms, nor WPF, and I assume not in WinUI either. The problem is that a lot of people are just too lazy to even try to step out of the HTML/JS comfort zone, not that it's hard to do.
I loved the K-Lite Codec Pack and CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) back in the XP days, especially while exploring MKVs and anime, but I virtually never run into a media file that VLC or MPC-HC can't play by default these days. Just drop it in and it plays.
If I understand correctly, most of what K-Lite / CCCP did was wrapping libavcodec/libavformat for the Windows APIs, so native players could use them. VLC just ships with libavcodec included, so it supports all these formats. Not sure about MPC-HC nowadays (it used to use Windows APIs, but you’d usually get it with your codec pack installer anyway).
K-lite originally was a giant mess of stuff that gradually got pruned down as the libav-based things got better and covered more of what was needed. These days it's just mpc-hc plus lavfilters and a few incidental tools.
I still use K-Lite since they ship MPC-HC (a fork of Media Player Classic) that comes with really good HDR support and default configuration out of the box. If you don't like to have the desktop in HDR you can even configure it to automatically toggle on/off HDR whenever an HDR movies is played.
The HDR support in VLC has been really lackluster. Maybe it is better nowadays, I don't know.
I don't think I've ever voluntarily used their shitty media player since the classic version. MPC-BE (some folks use MPC-HC) is my goto with VLC as a backup if certain codecs don't play nice with it. I'm able to use nVidia super resolution with them as well.
> The modern Media Player is said to use around 377MB of RAM when idle, compared to roughly 103MB for the old player—about 3.5x as much memory while doing absolutely nothing.
Idk, it is a media player. I’m not mad about it keeping a ton of cover images and audio stubs in memory for immediate playback. Plus probably metadata of the entire library, with various indices. Makes sense to me.
We might expect newer players to cache less because SSDs are fast, but perhaps this is offset by the increasing use of network storage, whether it’s internet-based or a local HDD NAS.
Kind of a pity that we used up the phrase "a fractal of bad design" on php, it's so applicable to much of the stuff coming out of MS. I've been using PowerBi for a few weeks now and I'm sometimes impressed by the novel ways it finds to suck.
Windows media player always sort of sucked. I remember when I discovered mplayer. What a breath of fresh air by comparison. ostensibly worse, with it's barely there user interface. But... all it did was play video, it would play anything, no more faffing about with installing codecs or different programs for different formats. No annoying ui that tried too hard to look like a piece of hi-fi gear.
I am not sure exactly what happened to it, it's maintainer moved on to other projects I imagine, it's current equivalent is probably mpv
The article mentions W11 24H2 but that might have been the only update the article had if it was first published much earlier. Might have even been an advance warning about AC-3 even before 24H2 was released.
Otherwise looks a bit deceptively like new findings just because the date at the top of the page says June 18, 2026 :\
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.
It's nice to see that someone revived MPC-HC (again). For a while MPC-BE[1] was the alternative. I don't know how they compare today, but the latter is still great.
Ugh... for the life of me I still can't understand why you can't click to play pause in VLC. Probably once upon a time it was about dvd, but the number of played dvds compared to pirated mk4 is probably one to a billion.
I rarely use widows, but i feel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player. Most people dont play local videos anyway, and those who do use something else like VLC.
feel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player
This is probably not far from the truth. Although, I think it's still an important box to check, even if only 2.5 boomers are going to use an out-of-the-box media player.
As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expect them to include into price of the GPUs with hardware support i.e. all of them made in the last decade.
The Media Player the article about is a fully "native" app though (at least if you count C# as native). The Windows8.x version (Xbox Music) was web tech based; it in turn was a reskin/UI-layer-rewrite of Zune (which was C++), so they've already gone through a whole cycle of native->web->native with this. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!)
This article is likely AI slop, none of this is "news" and I'm pretty sure that this is just factually Not Accurate. Windows 11 is not shipping a new media player, it has the same one as it has since Win10. Codecs have like HEVC/H.265 always cost a very small amount of money, in order to pay patent owners. Again, it has done this for years now.
The rebrand of Groove Music to Media Player was a Windows 11 thing, so it sort of did ship a "new" media player. It also still ships the old one though (as "Windows Media Player Legacy")
I wonder how the memory footprint would compare between vanilla Windows 11 (latest) and Windows 11 with all user apps substituted for memory efficient native apps. I know there are several third party “de-bloat” flavours but I believe they focus more on disabling redundant services.
Qubes OS is nice for that. Set up a plain vanilla Windows TemplateVM (Windows Firewall whitelisting in/outbound connections), clone the vanilla template for each subset of applications, then make a bunch of AppVMs which point to those cloned templates.
Can't wait for said professional software to eventually decide that Electron's the way to go as well, and make shittier new versions, but cross-platform.
(I don't know if this can be sarcasm anymore.)
What is Windows's moat among the business crowd? Is it the "can't get fired if they buy Windows" mantra?
Being Electron doesn't mean that the developer will release builds for all platforms that Electron supports. Discord took 3 years, for example.
> What is Windows's moat among the business crowd?
The moat is that it just works[1] will all of their software developed over the past 30 years, and support contracts/staff[2] is incredibly easy to obtain.
1. Contrarians will say that wine has better backwards compatibility than windows, but that's just cope and limited to a handful of games (and even then it's only because people made elaborate compatibility profiles for those specific games, those won't exist for internal apps).
2. Linux sysadmins are easy to obtain, but dedicated staff to support a desktop linux fleet is still fairly niche. There is some overlap in skillset and sysadmins can learn, of course.
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 native frontend APIs. The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily, and probably LLMs know way better how to deal with a react app than an UML one.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/lawsuits-licensing-a...
'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.
'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers'
That's how a lot of software gets done these days. More bloat, less features, lots of inconsistencies.
Perhaps the AI boom will encourage / subsidize(?) native development in a way? If it can be made more approachable, then maybe it would become more prevalent...
No, bad vendors will just use AI to reduce time-to-market, skimp on QC, or do the same with fewer developers.
This is a leadership problem, not a technical one.
Oh my dear sweet summer child
Especially for a company the size of Microsoft.
The programs shipped with the OS should be exemplary versions of each thing.
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.
A problem in isolation this is not, however. Large portions of Windows now have this same bloat in terms of executable filesize, runtime needed for basic functions, and RAM usage. Windows Media Player by itself might not be an issue, but it's part of a trend that now affects Explorer, Desktop Window Manager, and a bunch of other core components to the operating system.
Have you heard that there's a RAM shortage?
Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.
And Microsoft has incentive to force users to upgrade because their computers need more RAM, disk, and CPU
Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.
Considering the way Microsoft's product line is these days, I have a hard time believing its terabytes of "telemetry" go anywhere but the Windows equivalent of /dev/null.
If all apps are developed with the same mindset, all of them would consume much more memory. Does the average user have a 3x buffer just in case? I doubt the median-ish 8GB is enough these days.
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.
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.
I don’t want a trillion dollar investment in ram reduction, but the fist 80% of optimisation will be trivially achieved. Microsoft have a conflict of interest given they also sell surface devices where pushing people to the more expensive models is beneficial, while also probably benefiting when other hardware manufacturers benefit too.
> Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses
Famous last words.
The price of RAM skyrocketed in the last months. The users will care.
I don’t know if that really is any different than any other time.
You do not know what unacceptable means. Everyone that uses or buys Windows “accepts” it. What you mean is that you don’t agree.
I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here.
Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.
No, no and no.
Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit.
Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.
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.
> Things get swapped in and out of memory when they need to.
Great, so now that SSD I've got can wear out more quickly!
> It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.
Already do. My heart still aches for those who don't know any better.
Chrome does it, so it must be good? Is a extra 200mb going to cause the computer to choke? probably not, but that doesn't mean people cant complain about the fact that a lot of modern software has gone this route and it all does add up.
I really only enjoyed Windows Media Player for its visualizations. I found that VLC could get close, but not quite an exact match (most likely due to licensing); there's something quite entrancing about them, and how they'd move in time and change with the music.
It's come and gone, and I'm still not fully sure what Groove Music was; was it something to do with the Zune?
> 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 assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
The older I get the more volunteer software projects I donate to. VLC being one of them.
> 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.
Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
then all you need is 64k
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…
I feel you - the most annoying thing about this sort of bloat is just not being able to keep up with or identify everything that's running. Don't get me wrong, this can be a problem on MacOS or Linux, but it feels much more manageable in a *nix environment even though I grew up with DOS/windows.
I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building.
The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.
Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.
Not even microsoft can sink microsoft.
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.
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”.
It does not matter how well or poorly Chrome mismanages memory, 400MB is still 400MB. If that 400MB is 10% of the free RAM after the share the OS takes, then that is a hefty toll. And the regular updates Windows 11 users are getting are famously not providing value, but taking value away. Case in point right here is the new media player.
People try to use Windows 11 with 4GB of RAM?
I doubt that's viable, honestly... At that point, just don't use microslop software
Windows 10 was viable with 4 GB, assuming you restricted yourself. Nowadays it mostly isn't, precisely because of things like this.
Windows Server 2022 comes up just fine in 4-8GB RAM disposable qubes. I can easily load Adobe MCCS6 applications in that. I can run Mathematica in that. I can load Siemens NX 10-12 in that and do basic modeling!
#StopTheBloat #StopTheOffshoring
I have a few Azure VMS running server 2022 with 2GB running as a controller. Works surprisingly well.
And you're running windows media player on these? I doubt that, so entirely unrelated to the fact that windows 11 does not, which is the OS the vibecoded slop media player is gonna be used on.
> This new software replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player across all Windows 11 PCs.
IME, there is a negative correlation “justifies increased memory consumption by citing DX” and “ships code with fewer critical issues.”
A single Chrome tab does not use gigabytes. In fact, this app IS a Chrome tab! It's web based, so it's using Edge, which is just Chrome in a trenchcoat.
Isn't Edge slightly more efficient than Chrome on Windows? Maybe it's changed, but that's always been what everyone has said.
Only in that they change the default settings to sleep tabs more aggressively. It's the same codebase.
How come I have never seen this tradeoff work in practice?
You see it all the time in Slack, Discord and so on.
Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?
But… everyone thinks those are awful as well
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.
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!
That would actually be like taxing or regulating the code itself, which could be pretty straightforward in proportion to its size and resource wastage.
I just think taxes have proven to be highly nonideal unless they are levied against some added-value being realized, but you're giving me ideas.
You could perhaps partially tax based on value too, but it could start to get confusing and unfair again.
Either way, taxes would probably turn out to be more of a parasite in terms of how it can overwhelm the value added if levies rise far beyond relative insignificance. Regardless of what good might come of it on the surface looking at the code.
The code itself is already regulated anyway, I would rather see a minor adjustment to the regulation where only code in an open-standard low-level language can be copyrighted.
You wouldn't even need to add enough taxes for negative incentive if the higher-level stuff was set free, that would unleash incredible resources.
That might be one of the most effective ways to reverse the exponential increase in resource-hogging, with greatest urgency.
Couldn't do it overnight, probably have to roll it back against a timeline, one layer at a time. Simulate the reversal of the metastization as logically as can be done from this point.
There's just no way we should have ever needed more than 100mb of C: drive space as long as you wanted to run your office with no further features than Windows 95 with Office 97. To be generous another 100mb for multimedia and another 100 for internet, plus the OS and Microsoft apps are supposed to get more efficient from there since they were rushed to market in the '90's themselves.
Gigabytes were supposed to be for storage and media files, and there was never supposed to be any latency of any kind as soon as processors got up to 1GHz and you got off dial-up. Mice with balls were all that was necessary too, and that was with IDE HDDs.
All you can do is weep for what could have been.
The problem is that it does not. At all.
If Google and Apple also decided to remove support for common video formats instead of just paying the slightly higher licensing fee, I might have some sympathy.
Microsoft thinks they have all the money in the world when it comes to wasting huge sums on mergers and acquisitions that go nowhere. Spend some on maintaining the user experience.
Also, with Dell and others releasing new Windows laptops with 8 Gigs of RAM, needless memory bloat is unacceptable.
I believe, at this point they could direct AI to vibe rewrite every UI code written after 2010 in Win32 and MFC and the result would still be vastly better than crap they push us nowadays.
Probably there's not enough open source code to ~~steal~~ train the AI on for this to work. If they were to use Qt or GTK it'd work.
>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.
Leadership is weak.
As an operating system vendor, it should be a dismissable offence to refuse to use the OS standard APIs. Your products need to be the standard that other try to imitate.
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)
The web browser is a compiled program. The problem is that it’s a huge program.
It doesn't use JS/TS, it's a reskinned Groove Music and is all either C++ or C# (I think C#) + UWP/WinUI2 XAML
Xbox Music in Windows 8.x was actually web tech based, but was rewritten into C# and XAML when it was turned into Groove Music in Windows 10
> 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.
How do we live in a world where simultaneously "human coding is dead" and also "we need to trade performance for developer efficiency"? I thought code is free now?
Also--this is Microsoft! It's their OS!
Microsoft should just come out and say that the whole of Win32 is deprecated and kept around for legacy compatibility only, and all new software should be written in Electron. They're already acting that way, why not make it official?
Wouldn't HEVC licences already be paid by the hardware/gpu vendors on most devices? And Microsoft just exposes api for that hardware?
Is this just for a purely software implementation of it?
Nah. Search for "Nokia h264" and see for yourself how they've sued like every single vendor in recent years, because they want to double dip.
> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily
Ah yes, we don't want Microsoft to run out of JavaScript developers to keep improving their desktop operating system in this manner. More webdevs, that's what's going to fix what ails Windows!
> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps
I mean, I agree, but Microsoft of all companies really should be invested in building Windows native applications. If they can't be fucked to build Windows-native applications, why would anyone else?
Microsoft should be setting the example, and the high bar of what Windows-native quality software should be. It's frankly embarrassing for them that they can't or won't do it.
The modern native frontend APIs aren’t exactly lightweight themselves…
The HEVC support is free is you know the "secret" link:
ms-windows-store://pdp?productId=9N4WGH0Z6VHQ
It's a wide know workaround, been there for years, obviously Microsoft pretends they don't know about it.
https://www.howtogeek.com/680690/how-to-install-free-hevc-co...
Your link says this doesn't work anymore?
HEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.
It's not about the code. The open source implementations are also subject to patent laws, they just ignore them and put the responsibility on the user. And users don't know/care about it so in the end they get playback for free.
That is why some distributions (RHEL derivatives, for example) do not ship support for many codecs out of the box and they make you jump to (admittedly simple) hoops to get it working.
x265 is an encoder, not a decoder. Also, being open source doesn't matter here: an open source library, even with a patent grant, doesn't give you a license to someone else's patents.
VideoLAN wants you to pay the royalty for x265 and you'll get sued by patent pools if you use it in a company (and are big enough).
It must be possible these days to allow designers to prototype UIs in WebTech and then convert it to native code.
probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices
/clutches pearls
Won't somebody think of the trillion-dollar companies!
Windows 11 is not free software. Apple macOS, iOS, ipadOS all support HEVC and Dolby because Apple pays licensing costs, likewise Microsoft should do the same for Windows users, it is not free OS.
I don’t recall ever having a good time using a native Mac OS video player.
QuickTime is fine. It does the basics, is intuitive, and fast.
It’s been a few years since I tried but I think the codec support was pretty bad last time I checked. Sure it can play MOV files, but every time I tried to throw some pirated video at it it would choke.
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
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"
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 thought out.
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. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!)
2. it's not "after"; Groove Music was largely written in 2014-2017 in the early Windows 10 days, and even its rebrand as Media Player in Windows 11 happened in 2022, and it's barely been touched since then.
> 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...
There isn't even really a barrier. It's not actually hard to do UIs in WinForms, nor WPF, and I assume not in WinUI either. The problem is that a lot of people are just too lazy to even try to step out of the HTML/JS comfort zone, not that it's hard to do.
Which barrier?
Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?
I loved the K-Lite Codec Pack and CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) back in the XP days, especially while exploring MKVs and anime, but I virtually never run into a media file that VLC or MPC-HC can't play by default these days. Just drop it in and it plays.
If I understand correctly, most of what K-Lite / CCCP did was wrapping libavcodec/libavformat for the Windows APIs, so native players could use them. VLC just ships with libavcodec included, so it supports all these formats. Not sure about MPC-HC nowadays (it used to use Windows APIs, but you’d usually get it with your codec pack installer anyway).
K-lite originally was a giant mess of stuff that gradually got pruned down as the libav-based things got better and covered more of what was needed. These days it's just mpc-hc plus lavfilters and a few incidental tools.
I still use K-Lite since they ship MPC-HC (a fork of Media Player Classic) that comes with really good HDR support and default configuration out of the box. If you don't like to have the desktop in HDR you can even configure it to automatically toggle on/off HDR whenever an HDR movies is played.
The HDR support in VLC has been really lackluster. Maybe it is better nowadays, I don't know.
It stopped being a thing about 10 years ago.
Mostly because everything is H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, MP3 or AAC.
So the weekly updates are... fake?
https://codecguide.com/changelogs_standard.htm
jQuery is still being updated.
https://blog.jquery.com/2026/01/17/jquery-4-0-0/
And so is COBOL.
https://docs.rocketsoftware.com/bundle/visualcobol_rn9_90_pd...
And Opus: https://opus-codec.org/
These days you can just install SMPlayer and have all the codecs bundled in the player.
mpv
I don't think I've ever voluntarily used their shitty media player since the classic version. MPC-BE (some folks use MPC-HC) is my goto with VLC as a backup if certain codecs don't play nice with it. I'm able to use nVidia super resolution with them as well.
> The modern Media Player is said to use around 377MB of RAM when idle, compared to roughly 103MB for the old player—about 3.5x as much memory while doing absolutely nothing.
even 103MB sound like a lot for doing nothing
Idk, it is a media player. I’m not mad about it keeping a ton of cover images and audio stubs in memory for immediate playback. Plus probably metadata of the entire library, with various indices. Makes sense to me.
We might expect newer players to cache less because SSDs are fast, but perhaps this is offset by the increasing use of network storage, whether it’s internet-based or a local HDD NAS.
Idk, using the same file I got mpv: 144mb, vlc: 144mb.
Reccomendations for other lower ram solutions?
Kind of a pity that we used up the phrase "a fractal of bad design" on php, it's so applicable to much of the stuff coming out of MS. I've been using PowerBi for a few weeks now and I'm sometimes impressed by the novel ways it finds to suck.
What? I can find at least one article from 2018 about HEVC being pay-walled? [0]
EDIT: Also, what do they mean by "new" Media Player? It shipped in 2022 [1]. This article is garbage. The source article [2] is fine.
[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-v...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022)
[2]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-w...
So it started sucking almost a decade ago, checks out in my experience
Windows media player always sort of sucked. I remember when I discovered mplayer. What a breath of fresh air by comparison. ostensibly worse, with it's barely there user interface. But... all it did was play video, it would play anything, no more faffing about with installing codecs or different programs for different formats. No annoying ui that tried too hard to look like a piece of hi-fi gear.
I am not sure exactly what happened to it, it's maintainer moved on to other projects I imagine, it's current equivalent is probably mpv
The article mentions W11 24H2 but that might have been the only update the article had if it was first published much earlier. Might have even been an advance warning about AC-3 even before 24H2 was released.
Otherwise looks a bit deceptively like new findings just because the date at the top of the page says June 18, 2026 :\
As a certified MSFT's antifan, I’ve noticed Apple’s Music.app uses roughly 580 MiB of RAM for comparison.
itunes on windows still leaks memory like a water hose, it can go up to 4gb listening to online radio
Ooh, I love learning new words. What's an "antifan"?
A portmanteau of anti, and fan. 'Hater' wouldn't be exactly the same.
hater?
Are you making a joke or are you serious?
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...
I think Groove Music/Media Player is C# though
If it is using WinUI is it as much C# as using doing AI in Python is Python.
See WinUi and WinAppSDK repos on Github.
Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?
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/
Agreed, Media player classic is the Winamp of video.
It's nice to see that someone revived MPC-HC (again). For a while MPC-BE[1] was the alternative. I don't know how they compare today, but the latter is still great.
[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/
If mpv on Linux and MPC-HC on Windows, what is recommended on macOS?
I have been using mpv on MacOS too. I just had to create an app bundle for it a very simple swift wrapper which just runs mpv command...
Ugh... for the life of me I still can't understand why you can't click to play pause in VLC. Probably once upon a time it was about dvd, but the number of played dvds compared to pirated mk4 is probably one to a billion.
mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people
SMPplayer is a frontend for mpv which I use and like.
It also has MPC GUI mode for nostalgia :)
On macOS, IINA is my go-to mpv wrapper nowadays, and last time I tried, Haruna is pretty good on KDE.
Yep, highly recommend https://www.smplayer.info with dark skin :)
mpv is great for scripting, though.
There's https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net for Windows lusers.
IINA is much better on Mac
https://iina.io
MPC is better if you're on Windows.
Still vastly prefer mpv[0].
0. https://mpv.io
PotPlayer is the new kid, I guess? Personally I don't like VLC because of the UI, so I've always used MPC.
I rarely use widows, but i feel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player. Most people dont play local videos anyway, and those who do use something else like VLC.
Why is that HEVC video extension is required?
As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expect them to include into price of the GPUs with hardware support i.e. all of them made in the last decade.
HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.
Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.
When Windows 7 got an update, WMP decided to delete all the folder.jpg files for my CDs that it had earlier downloaded when I ripped them.
HEVC used to be a capped license per organization, so not providing it in the OS seems really harmful and expensive. Has the cap changed recently?
Hmm anyone remembers mplayer?
Last update seems to be from 2022 at mplayerhq.hu.
Used to be the go-to that played basically anything years ago.
mpv is that. In 2010 mplayer2 forked from mplayer, in 2012 mpv forked from mplayer2. It's all I've used since.
Oh thanks! I lost track because vlc became "good enough".
Didn't they just publicly make an apology for enshitting Windows over the last years, and committed to go back to building native app?
I understand that project might have started way before the public statement but it really doesn't look good from a PR standpoint.
The Media Player the article about is a fully "native" app though (at least if you count C# as native). The Windows8.x version (Xbox Music) was web tech based; it in turn was a reskin/UI-layer-rewrite of Zune (which was C++), so they've already gone through a whole cycle of native->web->native with this. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!)
This article is likely AI slop, none of this is "news" and I'm pretty sure that this is just factually Not Accurate. Windows 11 is not shipping a new media player, it has the same one as it has since Win10. Codecs have like HEVC/H.265 always cost a very small amount of money, in order to pay patent owners. Again, it has done this for years now.
The rebrand of Groove Music to Media Player was a Windows 11 thing, so it sort of did ship a "new" media player. It also still ships the old one though (as "Windows Media Player Legacy")
I love VLC <3
Every day there seems to be a new reason not to use Windows and still people keep using Windows!
The suffering will continue until there are good alternatives.
A solution for AC-3 is to get Dolby Digital Plus decoder for PC OEMs from here:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_inst...
and then you recieve the latest update from windows store.
I wonder how the memory footprint would compare between vanilla Windows 11 (latest) and Windows 11 with all user apps substituted for memory efficient native apps. I know there are several third party “de-bloat” flavours but I believe they focus more on disabling redundant services.
For everything except sabotage-ware rootkit based games, Linux is the better solution for basically everything.
Running MS Windows these days is like having a "kick me, hard" sign on your back. Or, you're treated like a money and data piñata.
There is a lot of professional software that locks people in also.
Qubes OS is nice for that. Set up a plain vanilla Windows TemplateVM (Windows Firewall whitelisting in/outbound connections), clone the vanilla template for each subset of applications, then make a bunch of AppVMs which point to those cloned templates.
The big bummer with Qubes and Linux virtualization is that there's no easy way to spoof or lie about hardware.
Some software is invasive in that it actively scans for VM's and does bad stuff.
Can't wait for said professional software to eventually decide that Electron's the way to go as well, and make shittier new versions, but cross-platform.
(I don't know if this can be sarcasm anymore.)
What is Windows's moat among the business crowd? Is it the "can't get fired if they buy Windows" mantra?
(Well, now they can get laid off anyway.)
Being Electron doesn't mean that the developer will release builds for all platforms that Electron supports. Discord took 3 years, for example.
> What is Windows's moat among the business crowd?
The moat is that it just works[1] will all of their software developed over the past 30 years, and support contracts/staff[2] is incredibly easy to obtain.
1. Contrarians will say that wine has better backwards compatibility than windows, but that's just cope and limited to a handful of games (and even then it's only because people made elaborate compatibility profiles for those specific games, those won't exist for internal apps).
2. Linux sysadmins are easy to obtain, but dedicated staff to support a desktop linux fleet is still fairly niche. There is some overlap in skillset and sysadmins can learn, of course.
M$ knows the laws will change in their favor requiring a gov ID to boot a computer. This is how they will get away with crap like this.