wMedia Player (abbreviated WMP) is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video andviewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobilebased devices. Editions ofWindows Media Player were also released for Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris but development of these has since been discontinued.
In addition to being amedia player, Windows Media Player includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to compact discs, build Audio CDs in recordable discs andsynchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enables users to purchase or rent music from a number of onlinemusic stores.
Windows Media Player replaced an earlier piece of software called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback.
Thecurrent version, Windows Media Player 11, was released on October 30, 2006. Its successor, Windows Media Player 12, is under development; an initial testversion was demonstrated in October 2008 as part of Windows 7.
The default file formats are Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), andAdvanced Systems Format (ASF), and supports its own XML based playlist format called Windows Playlist (WPL). The player is also able to utilize a digitalrights management service in the form of Windows Media DRM.
Allows the user to connect, share and sync data with portable handheld devices and gameconsoles. Media can be optionally transcoded to a format better suited for the target device, automatically, when synchronizing.
Playback of audio, videoand pictures, along with fast forward, reverse, seek and time compression and dilation.
Supports local playback, streaming playback and progressivedownloads.
Support for any media codec and container format using specific DirectShow filters.
Full media management, via the integrated media library,which offers cataloguing and searching of media. Media can be arranged according to album, artist, genre, date et al..
Video Smoothing which upscalesframerate by interpolating added frames, in effect giving a smoother playback on lowframerate videos.
Includes a 10band graphic equalizer and SRS WOWaudio postprocessing system. Windows Media Player can also have attached plugins which process the output audio or video data.
Windows Media Player 11running in mini mode in Windows Vista and Windows XP.
Features a taskbarmounted Mini mode in which the most common media control buttons are presented asa toolbar on the Windows taskbar. Flyout windows can display media information, the active visualization or the video being played back.
Can use videooverlays or VMR surfaces, if the video card supports them. In Windows XP, it uses VMR7 by default, but can also be made to use the more advanced YUVmixing mode by enabling the "Use high quality mode" option in Advanced Performance settings. This turns on deinterlacing, scaling andimproved color accuracy.
Version 11 introduced improved support for DirectX accelerated decoding of WMV video (DXVA decoding)
Features integratedCDburning support for audio as well as data CDs. Data CDs can have any of the media formats supported by the player. While burning Data CDs, the mediacan, optionally, be transcoded into WMA format.
Audio CDs can be ripped as WMA or WMA 10 Pro at 48, 64, 96, 128, 160 and 192 kbit/s, WMA lossless (470 to940 kbit/s), WMA variable bitrate (from 4075 kbit/s up to 240355 kbit/s), MP3 at 128, 192, 256 and 320 kbit/s, or uncompressed WAV. 24 bit highresolutionCDs are also supported, if capable audio hardware is present.
Information on CDs such as album name, artist and track listings can optionally beautomatically downloaded from the Microsoft Windows Media Database when the CD is inserted.
Includes intrinsic support for Windows Media codecs whichsupport multichannel audio at up to 24bit 192 kHz resolution.
Can play files in WMA, WAV or MP3 media formats. However, it will not play MP3 files thatcontain compressed ID3 headers ("tags"); trying to do so results in a "The input media file is invalid" errormessage.
Supports subtitles and closedcaptioning, if present in the media.
Features "Synchronized Lyrics", by which different lines oflyrics can be timestamped, so that they display only at those times.
Windows Explorer shell integration to add files and playlist to the Now Playing andother playlists can be controlled from the Windows Explorer shell itself, via rightclick menu.
Provides an embeddedable ActiveX control for InternetExplorer so that developers can play Windows Media on web pages.
A fully featured tag editor was featured in versions 811 of WMP, called the Advanced TagEditor. However, the feature was not present in the latest preview version of Windows Media Player 12.
Away to bypass the WGA validation
1. extractedwmp11 installer
2. installed the wmfdist11.exe, then restarted
3. installed the wmp11.exe, then restarted it again
4. now its Windows media player11
Please do not forget to say thank you!
