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Media Operating Systems Windows

Windows 10 Update Removes Windows Media Player (betanews.com) 255

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Recently made available Windows 10 update KB4046355 for the Fall Creators Update disables Windows Media Player from the operating system. BetaNews reports: While it could be argued that Windows Media Player is no longer an essential addition to Windows -- there are plenty of quality third-party alternatives, such as VLC Media Player, not to mention the Films & TV app in Windows 10 itself -- many users still rely on it. The feature's removal came to light when users installed KB4046355 on devices running Windows 10 version 1709 -- the Fall Creators Update. This update, referred to as FeatureOnDemandMediaPlayer, removes Windows Media Player from the OS, although it doesn't kill access to it entirely. If you want the media player back you can install it via the Add a Feature setting. Open Settings, go to Apps > Apps & Features, and click on Manage optional features.
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Windows 10 Update Removes Windows Media Player More

Windows 10 Update Removes Windows Media Player

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  • Explain to me WHY this is a useful program?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Explain to me WHY this is a useful program?

      You mean Windows 10? The jury is still out on that one.
      There is good money to be made helping the victims of the push-update. Depending on the mental state of the victim and the levels of their drug addiction, some back to Win7, some forward to Linux.

    • Re:Windows 10 is a good Idea? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @02:49PM (#55338067) Homepage

      It's not. WMP has long out lived its usefulness. I honestly thought it was already gone. Imagine my surprise when it opened up the other day on some obscure video format that I had long forgotten about.

      VLC does a whole lot better job.

      • VLC does a whole lot better job.

        VLC reigns supreme on the desktop... but is completely useless on mobile. Especially for DLNA. I'm guessing a different team created the mobile version.

      • I was pissed when they removed Windows Media Center. I LOVED it for years on Windows 7 as I used my older PC as a TV to watch movies and thought the player and built in functions were very easy to use.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Windows media player is being removed because M$ is sick of being exposed as a huge loser. The worst accepted media player in the industry losing to pretty much everyone, simply better to not have one. It seems M$ is hunkering down, expecting more consumer losses and cutting everything they can to focus on exploiting areas where they have control via content lock it ie exploiting a monopoly to the death of the company. The mass privacy invasion of windows 10 has cost them dearly and likely will kill the com

      • Nope, WMP and Xbox upscale DVD to 1080 like nothing else. I'm not buying everything in blue ray, so I dug it. No other player is close. As in, I can a/b that shit all day long.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It does not seem to be, not even for MS itself. They are constantly outing themselves as the incompetents they are with Win10. Nadella recently wrote something about MS being "sick" when he took it over. It seems to me that state persists and is getting both worse and more obvious.

  • It could also be argued... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @02:38PM (#55337967)

    ...While it could be argued that Windows Media Player is no longer an essential addition to Windows...

    It could also be argued that the Windows 10 data harvesting is not an essential addition to Windows. Yet there it remains....

    .
    Makes one wonder what the real reason is for removing Media Player.

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @02:49PM (#55338063)

    It's a shell linking audio/video codecs (which still exist) to a simple set of video controls, perhaps with some mostly useless cruft, but it did a decent job.

    It definitely wasn't anywhere near the best player - but when you went to a random PC, you could be sure that most common videos would play.

    Why would you remove that as a minimal component on PCs? Browsers are OK - but when you're going for a presentation on a random PC, there's all kinds of ways those can crap out in ways that a simple default video player would be fine.

    Seems a very dumb thing to remove, if you want PCs to be useful general devices world-wide.

    And note - probably less than 2% of your user base is going to go onto the 'Windows Store' to try and get ANYTHING to fix this shortcoming. Attempting to profit from your own manufactured problem is not going to pay off in this case, compared to what it's costing you in terms of basic capability.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Windows 10 had multiple stock apps that could play audio/video. In addition to the old WMP, there was "Groove Music" for audio and "Movies & TV" for video. WMP was pretty crashy and bug-prone - and the UI didn't scale well to touch devices. Ditching WMP was a pretty solid move - cuts down on the bloat, all the functionality remains, and serious users will install something better anyways.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by viperidaenz ( 2515578 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @03:38PM (#55338463)

      If you try to open a file that has no associated application, Windows suggests you go to the Windows Store to download an app to open it.

      Regardless of this, there is already other media plays preinstalled in Windows 10. Windows Media Player wasn't the only one.

      It wasn't just a shell linking audio and video codecs to a UI, it was an attack vector that has been exploited in the past with malicious media files. Files that aren't supposed to be executable.
      Here's a list of 52 known vulnerabilities https://www.cvedetails.com/vul... [cvedetails.com]
      Some of them are remote code execution just by visiting a website: "The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if Windows Media Player opens specially crafted media content that is hosted on a malicious website"

    • It's a shell linking audio/video codecs (which still exist) to a simple set of video controls,

      Maybe 5 versions ago. Now it's a bloated mess.

    • If you have been forced to spend any time with windows 10 machines, you will know that microsoft has gone out of their way to prevent setting custom defaults for file associations that stick. Doubly true when you are trying to expressly not use win10 "apps". They probably ran the numbers and saw that the biggest competitor to their new, lamer, "store" "apps" was WMP.

      So they extinguished the competition. Extremely easy in this case for them.

      Those in the know use media player classic, or vlc. While the masses

  • Play for Sure, Zune, and countless other "features" ...

    Does anyone remember there was a Windows Multi Media Edition? One had to buy a Soundblaster card to get sound out of the box previously and HP keyboards had play/pause/volume controls on the keyboard ...

  • ...and nothing of value was lost. (Score:3)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @02:58PM (#55338145)

    (see title)

  • meh (Score:2)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )

    I like WMP better than Groove, because it doesn't have the obnoxious marketing thing going, though I've switched mostly to musicbee.

    Though as bad as Groove is, it's better than the pinnacle of incompetent design that is iTunes.

  • Feature removals (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @03:03PM (#55338189)
    These feature removals mostly seem troublesome at a locked down PC environment at school or work where you can't install anything. So while not disastrous, it is certainly annoying when you can't do some trivial thing on a computer without admin rights on it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      These feature removals mostly seem troublesome at a locked down PC environment at school or work where you can't install anything. So while not disastrous, it is certainly annoying when you can't do some trivial thing on a computer without admin rights on it.

      If the admin wants people playing videos on the machine, wouldn't they just add a video player as part of the standard workstation image? If anything, it makes things easier if the administrators don't have to go through and proactively remove a bunch of shovelware from a fresh OS install.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dissy ( 172727 )

      These feature removals mostly seem troublesome at a locked down PC environment at school or work where you can't install anything.

      At least for work related environments, such things are far less troublesome, and generally not at all for end users.

      Windows updates get centralized from one internal server which the admins can approve/deny on a per patch basis, as well as push to a testing group of computers to be vetted individually if need be.

      If the company standardized on media player, this KB update would not make it onto your computer until a group policy update was made to ensure it remains an enabled feature at the same time.
      If the

  • Given that you can add Windows Media Player back in, then title of this story is incorrect.

    WMP has not been removed, it's been made a non-default application ("Feature on Demand"). You can still add it back in fairly easily.

    Maybe Microsoft is planning on completely removing it in the long term, but they haven't removed it yet.

    It's still annoying. Users still use WMP and this is likely to cause a lot of confusion.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by OhPlz ( 168413 )

      How do you justify MS removing an application from an already installed Windows system? They shouldn't have to add it back if it was already there to begin with!

    • WMP has not been removed, it's been made a non-default application

      That would be the case in a fresh install, but not when you update to this build.

  • VLC....but I'm sure your typical "mom & pop" that use a computer how it comes out of the box might, but if they are on 10, did it even come with WMP?

  • As useless as media player is, does this mean no one will be able to access files on their android devices over USB anymore due to no MTP support? Because Windows 7 can't do it on versions lacking the media pack...

  • And this is why you never ever rely on any program made by Microsoft because they will either abandon it or remove it from you at some point. Always use open source software for everything, because you can quarantie it won't be taken away and even if it is abandoned you can still download the last version of it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      The same can happen with Google. Just saying. The main difference is that Google's stuff is usually web apps, so you can't even download the last version.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kbg ( 241421 )

        Yes partly, although Google usually gives you the option to migrate to a better product or at least gives you some warning before hand.

  • Use MPV and Clementine instead of VLC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheOuterLinux ( 4778741 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @05:13PM (#55339183) Homepage
    It's much much better, especially on Mac/Linux when it uses youtube-dl to support all these by default: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-... [github.io]. Need a music player? Use Clementine.

  • The Silicondust tuners can ONLY play DRM content with Windows Media Center.

    They (Silicondust) is about to be VERY unhappy... Not to mention those who bought the devices

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