Windows 10 To Feature Native Support For MKV and FLAC 313
jones_supa writes Windows Media Player is going to become a more useful media player for those who want to play geeky file formats. Microsoft has earlier confirmed that Windows 10 will come with native support for Matroska Video, but the company now talks about also adding FLAC support. Microsoft's Gabriel Aul posted a teaser screenshot in Twitter showing support for this particular format. It can be expected to arrive in a future update for people running the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Not many GUI changes seem to be happening around Media Player, but work is done under the hood.
VLC (Score:4, Insightful)
has been supporting these formats for how long?
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Geeky formats? (Score:3)
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Re: Geeky formats? (Score:2, Informative)
It allows for subtitles to be stored and turned on and off at the viewers discretion. Most other formats require a separate subtitle file or hard coded subs that cannot be turned off and are part of the video. There are far more foreign films aside from anime that benefit from a format like this. Not to mention having more than just dual audio and English subtitles like in anime. You can have a great many audio streams and singles for many reasons in a single file that is really changeable by the end user.
WebM uses MKV (Score:2)
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You also have to support MKV format to have the DivX logo.A lot of players support it by default.
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I could see why FLAC would be considered a geeky format, but MKV? It's pretty common, is it not?
Yes, but not in commercial use. Most commercial files without DRM that I've seen are just M4Vs. MKV is used more by hobbyists, IYKWIM. Microsoft has in fact never supported it. It's one of the reasons why you need a clever DLNA server to meaningfully feed your media to an Xbox if you play, uh, media from "disparate" sources.
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For the same reason you classify MKV as geeky, FLAC should not be considered geeky, since practically all online stores that sell music in 24bit or >= 88kHz offer their Downloads as FLAC
Well, what percentage of online music sales come from sites which offer music in 24 bit or >= 88kHz?
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Given that it is not Christmas yet[1], you can all make up your own Monster Cable joke.
[1] Not that you'd know it from the shops. Humbug.
Re: Geeky formats? (Score:2)
I regularly check the files I download. Most of them are encoded with mplayer/mencoder.
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Same reason they decided to support avi and mp3, and that's their wide spread use. If you have a bunch of people using a different player just because you didn't support those formats or made it difficult to play them, why would they stick with your eco system. Yeah it's probably not a big deal to Microsoft if you use VLC over WMP but it's nice if you can keep people in your eco system as much as possible. FLAC has been around for ages and while it's probably not something that's used as much as MKV is l
Is WebM uncommon? (Score:3)
MKV is only common for pirated non-streaming contents
"The WebM container is based on a profile of Matroska." [wikipedia.org] Are you now claiming that WebM itself is uncommon?
Google (Score:3)
Apple, Amazon, google are never going to natively support it on thier devices.
Except that WebM [wikipedia.org], the format that Google has pushed, IS USING MKV as a container.
Welcome to the 20th century! (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait....
Rather late (Score:5, Insightful)
Not having FLAC and mkv support for a media player is simply insane. Those who cares at all for sound quality uses FLAC, even my tiny mp3 player support FLAC.
That MS "boycotted" FLAC for years because it doesn't support DRM and isn't a MS-patent trap, just hurt their desire to control all media consumption on MS-platforms; they forgot a "boycott" works both ways, and that people just used software like VLC that actually supported what people wanted.
Re:Rather late (Score:4, Informative)
This is support out of the box. WMP supports both with the proper Directshow filters.
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Nope, I use high quality VBR MP3 for my music because a) it sounds great, b) it's supported on everything and c) it takes a lot less storage space. FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
VBR mp3's are very good, but it isn't FLAC. You don't need superhuman hearing to hear the difference, especially very dynamic music sounds better in FLAC. Hearing the difference becomes easier the better your audio equipment is.
Re:Rather late (Score:5, Insightful)
ABX testing shows otherwise. Even when done with professional audio engineers.
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ABX testing shows otherwise. Even when done with professional audio engineers.
Sure. I probably can't tell the difference either just by listening to a random segment of random music in an ABX test. I do can tell the difference when listening to the same well known album in FLAC and mp3. The FLAC files just are more dynamic; more punch and attack, while even HQ mp3's sounds slightly "dull" or muted. The more dynamic and "noisy" the music is, and the louder it is played, the larger the difference is.
Just downloaded a ABX test from here:
http://lacinato.com/cm/softwar... [lacinato.com]
If I can get it t
Tandeming (Score:2)
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If tandeming way down is OK (Score:3)
But just for shits and giggles I took a 320k MP3 and recoded to 128k and compared it to the CD where I ripped it as 128k and honestly? I can't tell a difference between the two.
If you can't ABX a difference between CD to 128K mp3/aac/ogg and CD to 256-320K mp3 to 128K mp3/aac/ogg, then I guess that problem is solved. Thanks for testing this for us.
Re:Rather late (Score:5, Insightful)
VBR mp3's are very good, but it isn't FLAC. You don't need superhuman hearing to hear the difference, especially very dynamic music sounds better in FLAC. Hearing the difference becomes easier the better your audio equipment is.
There is another reason to keep your master music source in lossless format. Future recoding. Mp3 are excellent for every day use. I honestly can't tell the difference between high quality mp3's and the original sources.
What people don't realize is that mp3's are on the way out. That is a close to 30 year old format. AAC is the rising star but like mp3 it is a lossy format. So what happens when mp3 is no longer supported? You recode them to the new format.
Recoding mp3 to aac really isn't that big a deal. I can't tell the difference between high quality mp3 to high quality aac recode. But what happens 4 or 5 generations down the road if you keep recoding with lossy formats? Your music sounds like shit eventually.
Flac allows you to keep a master backup in perfect condition to go back to with the recodes. And if your recoding for space on your master source that is bullshit. 3 TB harddrives are around a 150 bucks. That will store a life time of music even in flac format.
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4-5 generations? ...
Our computers still support ASCII from 1960. I'm sure that mp3 support won't go away in my lifetime. And copyright terms will expire before even your 2nd generation of lossy recoding happens.
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That may be, but the difference is dwarfed by the even larger difference between the hard disk quality from the different manufacturers.
Audiophiles are hilarious.
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Audiophiles are hilarious.
Just because some audiophiles are rich boys that spend too much money on bling hardware doesn't mean that all sound-systems sound the same. There actually is a sound difference between a pair of $1 headphones and a $100 pair of Sennheiser HD-558.
It doesn't cost much to get decent sound these days, and it really improves the joy of listening to music.
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Cellular Internet (Score:3)
isn't disk space really cheap these days?
Spinning disks at home yes, Internet-connected disks no. A free Dropbox provides only 2 GB, for instance. And cellular ISPs tend to charge about $10 per GB uploaded or downloaded.
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Nope, I use high quality VBR MP3 for my music because a) it sounds great, b) it's supported on everything and c) it takes a lot less storage space. FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
I use FLAC to rip my CDs losslessly, so if they ever break, get lost, or degrade, I'll be able to re-burn them with no loss of data. I won't pretend I can hear the difference, but I'd rather not take the chance if I have to reuse/transcode the files in the future.
Re: Rather late (Score:3)
+1
*That* is the real reason to have music in Flac. Please put aside the endless music format and abx testing debate where no one is going anywhere anytime soon (and throw Hi Res into the picture).
Buy if you want to buy a song or store it, you would obviously want a lossless format, and flac would be the obvious choice. You can always covert flac into a lossy compressed format and based on your storage constraint (in say your portable media device or phone), figure out how much audio quality you want to lose
Re:Rather late (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, I use high quality VBR MP3 for my music because a) it sounds great, b) it's supported on everything and c) it takes a lot less storage space. FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
No. FLAC is for idiots who don't see any reason to throw away some information that might be of use later (say when mixing, postprocession etc. the music) just because it saves a little space on a insanely cheap hard drive.
High quality MP3s sound good enough, I agree. But when I store something, I store it in the best quality possible, even if I don't need that quality right now in everyday use. Things change, and I might need it later on.
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Re:Rather late (Score:5, Informative)
Hard drives are cheap. Ripping all my CDs once as FLAC means that I don't have to shuffle through 700+ CDs to find the one I'm looking for.
Also, some of my older CDs were already unreadable or hard to read. Having a backup in original quality is important.
I buy music online in FLAC or WAV format from:
Bandcamp.com
Bleep.com
Boomkat.com
FSOLdigital.com
Junodownload.com
and others
Or I download legally for free in FLAC format from Archive.org.
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No benefit? Having a backup in original quality is benefit enough, I would think.
Well, those site pretty much cover my taste in music.
I don't need my whole music collection on my phone (which doubles as music player). The 40 Gig that I can spare for music has been plenty, so far.
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I've got one with 8TB.
Nerdy nerdy nerr nerr/
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/thread
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Right... Back in the day I had a MP3 player with a few dozen MB of memory. So to fit as much music on it as possble I converted it to MP3s with less than 128 kbps.
A few years later, I had MP3 players with several hundred MB. And them with some GB.
What was a sensible choice 15 years ago isn't anymore today. And you can not got up from lossy encoded music files.
FLAC files are about 2-3 times bigger than a high-quality (320 kbps) MP3 file.
So your collection would be less than 400 GB.
Considering that todays har
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1990 called. They want their storage technology back.
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FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
FLAC is also for users that want to store the original audio without any losses.
You can always encode and compress the audio again to suit your purposes, but you can't go backwards from a lossy format into a lossless one.
Whether this is for permanent future compatibility or because you wish to work with, edit, mix the audio in some way is another story.
But there's no reason to support what is essentially a worldwide standard for losslessly compressed audio, except of course because it doesn't support DRM..
Re: Rather late (Score:2)
FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
Archiving in a compressed format is for idiots who don't understand coding quantization noise. Have fun re-ripping again in a few years.
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Reading comprehension. You lack it. He suggested that people who archived in a compressed (implying lossy, in this instance) format would have to re-rip--NOT people who used FLAC. Stop stabbing your fingers into your eyeballs trying to be offended.
He was defending the use of FLAC, not ripping on it.
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While I would agree with you about not being able to differentiate between MP3 and FLAC in terms of sound, I don't agree about support (even shitty Chinese MP3 players do it natively) and storage space isn't an issue anymore nowadays. Maybe that 1GB MP3 player would fit 10 albums instead of 3 by using MP3 versus FLAC, but that's a sign you should go for a newer MP3 player (as in spend 30 bucks on a 16 GB MP3 player).
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I have 1+TB of music on my HDDs. I don't need an MP3 player to listen to it, and I can listen to any of it, from anywhere, using my mobile phone and PLEX Media Server (on my PC) combined with the Android client (on my phone).
There's one method to achieve hassle-free access to all your music.
The purpose of an MP3 player is different; it's never intended to hold ALL your music, especially if you have alot of it.
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Every player should hold all my music, otherwise what's the point? But It's only a matter of time before a micro-SD card that can hold everything in FLAC is cheap, at which point it's a non-issue.
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Good luck listening to 32 kbit WMAs then.
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Bullshit. That is the entire purpose of an MP3 player, else we'd all still be using portable CD players.
Bollocks. To see why, let's do a thought experiment. If there was an optical disc and it happened to be able to hold all your music (insert a sufficiently large value here to satisfy you), but it still skipped if you ran through your n-second buffer, would you still be using it? Probably not. So right there, that's another reason to use an MP3 player, meaning "holding all my music" is NOT the "entire purpose" of an MP3 player. QED.
Secondly, most of us don't need to carry *everything*. I used to carry larger
300 second buffer to hold an entire song (Score:2)
If there was an optical disc and it happened to be able to hold all your music (insert a sufficiently large value here to satisfy you), but it still skipped if you ran through your n-second buffer, would you still be using it?
Let n > the length of one piece of music and it's fine. If there were a digital audio player with a BD-ROM drive that could hold 25,000 minutes of music but started skipping if I were to jog for 4 minutes straight, that wouldn't be a problem. I could catch my breath every 3 minutes, and the BD player could catch its. That's why I bought an MP3 CD player years ago before sufficiently large solid state digital audio players became affordable, because MP3 allowed for a much larger skip buffer than a Red Boo
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My MP3 players, a SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip (running Rockbox) and a Creative Zen X-fi2, have 136GB and 64GB of storage space respectively. My entire MP3 library almost fits on the Sansa. If they were FLAC files, I would only be able to fit about 1/10th that amount
Working with made-up numbers is fun, right?
A FLAC file is about 2-3 times as big as a high quality MP3 file.
So unless you encoded your complete collection with 80 kbps, we're talking about 1/3 and not 1/10.
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Both maths and real tests tell that higher than CD quality is useless.
I will agree than 320Kbps MP3 or high bitrate VBR is enough, but with flac you can simply ignore the whole issue and have it 100% the same as the source. You can go maximum overkill with 24bit/48KHz flac (I'd be curious to know how it compresses versus the same downsampled to 16bit, perhaps the fill size is not much bigger)
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None at all, then!
Some people play their music upsampled to 192KHz, so they can then play it at 192KHz on their DAC which is not only useless but causes a subtle degradation (probably inaudible anyway)
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I still have two or three recent (i.e. last four or five years) devices that have problems seeking VBR files or displaying the proper duration.
Even foobar2000 has issues with seeking in MP3s. From the FAQ [foobar2000.org]:
Why is seeking so slow while playing MP3 files?
The MP3 format doesn't natively support sample-accurate seeking, and sample accurate seeking is absolutely required by some features of foobar2000 (such as .CUE playback). MP3 seeking can't be optimized neither for CBR files (frame sizes aren't really constant because of padding used), nor for VBR files (both Xing and VBRI headers in those files contain only approximated info and are useless for sample-exact seeking). Therefore MP3 seeking works by bruteforce-walking the MPEG stream chain and is appropriately slow (this gets faster when you pass through the same point of file for the second time because seektables have been built in the RAM).
FLACs omission was strategic (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple are now in the same position, not including support for FLAC to push Apple Lossless on people.
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Same for pushing WMA - they even went to the extent of bundling with Windows a CD ripper that only saved to WMA and a simple video editing application that only saved to WMV. Even with that level of underhanded advantage they could never establish a dominant position.
MP3 is just too entrenched. Many have tried to displace it, both open-source and propritary. Mp3 pro, vorbis, WMA, AAC, AC3... some have achieved a level of success, but none rival MP3 in popularity. Despite the fact that, compared to any of th
About time (Score:2)
MKV and FLAC are not "geeky". MKV is simply a superior container format for video. Xvid has been on the way out for awhile now, and FLAC is necessary for people that truly care about audio quality, so it's more of an audiophile format. It could be said those peo
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I like xvid video in mkv container fine, thanks.
In truth, I don't care very much about the video container or codec, I'm more bothered that the sound track is usually 128kbps MP3 or 128Kbps AAC and not something with twice the bitrate while keeping the video size low enough.
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xvid is rather badly dated now. h264 is the current holder of the 'best codec' title, though another may well displace it in time.
I vaguely understand that VP8 and h264 are actually around the same level, as codecs - but h264 has a very mature and refined encoder, x264.
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I don't know about their market share, but the new CEO probably has something to do with it, Ballmer would probably resolutely steer the titanic straight ahead into the iceberg if he was around.
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Welcome to the 21st Century (Score:2)
Glad you could make it Microsoft. Glad you could come to the party and support formats that we've had for years. Oh and please make sure you support the latest and greatest too and do a good job? Not like you've done for MP4.
How About "Everything" Support? (Score:3)
Consumers want a program that will play any media you throw at it, without it whining about codecs or DRM or any other unneeded pains in the ass; I know this is a stretch... but has anyone at MS considered that?
Guess not.
Windows Media Center support? (Score:2)
What I'd like to know is whether or not this means we don't have a install a codec park (like Shark007) just so we can get support for all the common video formats in Windows Media Center.
Talking of Windows Media Center, does Windows 10 actually improve on this awesome (but sadly neglected) piece of software - or are they going to squander the opportunity again like they did with Windows 8?
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What I'd like to know is whether or not this means we don't have a install a codec park (like Shark007) just so we can get support for all the common video formats in Windows Media Center.
Nope. It only means that you won't have to install a codec pack with support for MKV containers. You'll still need to install codecs if you want to play the files with the latest, greatest encoding. The container support will still have to be maintained until the sun sets on current versions of windows, but if this signals a change in Microsoft's attitude towards container formats, it might help them remain relevant. I know I used to use WIMP a lot because it was the only thing which was very good at identi
Run all-MS software stack! (Score:2, Interesting)
This reminds me of the days you could run IE5, Windows Media Player 6.0 (don't update to 7 it's garbage!), Paint, Notepad, MSN Messenger and it was all good.
File manager turning into IE or FTP and vice versa was awesome and the software very lightweight. Pinnacle of GUI, of course Active Desktop was the first sign of garbage you had to disable so you had the first signs of microsoft turning really evil and crappy.
Great games and software in the quicklaunch if you wanted, including the almost-real DOS prompt
addendum (Score:2)
To me it's kind of a lost computing heaven, much like some of you nuts that used NeXT, BeOS, Amiga or whatever perfect "real Unix" that never really existed. Of course IE had to go first, replaced by firefox 0.x and 1.x, then the 64K resource limit got atrocious (Firefox 0.7 ; problem stabilized at version 0.9 ; then Steam as a huge offender) and then only the 2000/XP/2003 branch was viable. Had to move from that one to linux.
Stupid (Score:2)
Yeah WMP, now supporting 2004 formats (Score:2)
Even so... (Score:3)
I'm still going to uninstall Media Player as soon as I buy a new Windows box or upgrade to 10. I haven't used Media Player in probably 10 years now. Shit, even Winamp is outdated and no longer being developed but it still handles everything better than Media Player -- including FLAC.
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I'm still going to uninstall Media Player as soon as I buy a new Windows box or upgrade to 10.
Why bother uninstalling it?
Native MKV, about time! (Score:2)
Wow, about freaking time... Welcome to the MKV party... about 10 years late.
As to why it is geeky, I would say because at one time pretty much all anime coming out of Japan was MKV format.
They have probably noticed that the MS Media Player sucks, and that users are moving en masse to alternatives. Mostly to VLC.
About the ONLY reason I still use MS Media Player at all, is because it is integrated with the Windows Media Center. If there was a VLC version that worked as a Media Center and remote that didn't su
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The container makes no significent difference to the size of the file. That's a codec thing. Codec and container are seperate.
MKV is popular for anime because it has reliable support for multiple audio streams and subtitle streams. Something that AVI and MP4 lack.
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I have noticed a trend in movies including more and more subtitles and foreign language in mostly English films.
It may just be the tinfoil hat in me, but either this is a cultural thing, or an artistic thing, but my gut tells me that the industry knows that much of the digital formats and players used, are not very sub friendly, making it harder to reproduce... particularly in regards to only partial subs. Formats (formally) supported by MS would fall into that category.
Perhaps this is MS finally starting t
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Someone in hollywood probably decided it makes the audience feel more intelligent.
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People have been messing about with Media Player for years with Codec packs and various other add ons for years trying to make it more useful than MS will let it be. Crazy.
You're right; Microsoft is really crazy for developing a platform that lets anyone create plugins/addons so that the user can customize their experience. Microsoft should have been less crazy and not let any non-MS software run on, or plug into, any of its platforms.
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They are not supported at all. You can kill your Media Player in the attempt. Your can need a clean Windows install to fix. Half of the things are laden with adware.
As mentioned, most are more willing to just stop using Media Player entirely, and instead use VLC, which requires none of that crap. How is it that VLC can do it and yet MS cannot. A: They can, but choose not to, so screw you users, we refuse to give you want you want.
That is what this is all about.
I see MS allowing MKV into the fold as a small
In other news (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Great, now let's talk filesystems (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should it have native support for ext2 or ext3?
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Honestly, you'd think they'd want to make it easy to move data from Linux to Windows, but right now it's only easy going the opposite direction.
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You mean like ReFS
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They are hobbyist filesystems, and serious Linux installations use others.
Really? I've been in the field since day one when Linus announced the birth of linux. I've seen thousands of linux systems in the field doing real work. To this day I have never come across a 3rd party file system on linix in the field.
I actually think you have it backwards. All the other filesystems seem to be for hobbyist, because that is all I have ever seen run them.
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By that time it will look like something else. Maybe it will be Unix-based by then, and virtualize Windows installs for applications. Or they'll be out of business then.
Even Linux is moving on past those filesystems, except for the chunky-funky variety of embedded devices which don't use some adorable little flash filesystem you have to recook on your desktop, the ones which look more (internally) like someone shrunk the PC.
In the meantime, computing resources are cheap enough to waste them virtualizing Lin
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Never. Microsoft is hoping that ExFAT will become the next filesystem for portable media - and hoping very much because they hold critical patents to impliment it. They aren't going to support a competing technology.
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Or read-only would be more trivial to implement, so that poor sheeps that strolled out of the microsoft true path can migrate their data.
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Then how about ZFS? No GPL virus there, while simultaneously being much farther along than btrfs and having a good kernel-level Linux port.
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Foobar2000 is a clusterfark of bad plugins and a really weird interface that takes forever to figure out. It's IKEA. Lots of assembly required.
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I've used it quite a bit. Seriously, I'd rather use WMP than that crap if it weren't for the file format support. For example, double click on a media file in explorer and it'll add it to your playlist. Playlists are organized as tabs. The whole interface just sucks and very few people have the time to frak around with a bunch of buggy plugins that 'almost' work.
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You need weird-ass buggy fb2k plugins, but are only missing format support in WMP? Do you play a lot of ancient tracker music or something?
If you find the fb2k interface so intimidating perhaps you'd be better off with its much simpler cousin, Boom [perkele.cc]. Not sure if it's got much support for particularly oddball media formats though.
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I stopped using Media Player back when you had to sign your life away in a bunch of EULAs and dialog boxes when it started up and had to use WGA just to download the latest version (required for something or other I forget now). VLC & WinAmp all the way.
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VLCs UI constantly pisses me off - I just can't use it. Fortunately Media Player Classic is there, with the UI I like and no EULAs or DRM.
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sadly, GNU/Linux is turning into a bloated pile of rubbish the same as windows, the core systems arround the kernel have been taken over by idiot-savants with no common sense and no engineering ability.
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FLAC is not new, it's a lossless format, meaning, it compresses audio but you don't lose quality in the process.
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