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  • Hacker News
  • HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.

    Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.

    by queenkjuul
  • 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.

    by naturalmovement
  • Reducing this to a simple language fanboy war is a massive oversimplification. Recent memory bloat and performance issues happen everywhere, whether it's C++, Java, or React. In most cases the real culprit is architecture and implementation not the language. Such as embedding browser engines just for cross platform UI.

    You talk as if language choice dictates performance but even C# allows active stack allocation for optimization. Conversely C++ becomes a bloated mess if poorly implemented. In fact terrible C++ code has caused issues for decades.

    Ultimately the root cause is that as users' available memory expanded, developers (or rather, management) stopped caring about memory usage. This approach is finally hitting its limit and alternatives are emerging.

    by lpln3452
  • 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...

    by pjmlp
  • As a certified MSFT's antifan, I’ve noticed Apple’s Music.app uses roughly 580 MiB of RAM for comparison.
    by SSLy
  • Ooh, I love learning new words. What's an "antifan"?
    by encrypted_bird
  • itunes on windows still leaks memory like a water hose, it can go up to 4gb listening to online radio
    by krieger_857
  • Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?
    by megamike
  • IINA is much better on Mac

    https://iina.io

    by bl4kers
  • MPC is better if you're on Windows.
    by applfanboysbgon
  • Still vastly prefer mpv[0].

    0. https://mpv.io

    by snvzz
  • PotPlayer is the new kid, I guess? Personally I don't like VLC because of the UI, so I've always used MPC.
    by AlienRobot
  • mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people
    by functionmouse
  • 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/

    by magicalhippo
  • 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...

    by shaokind
  • So it started sucking almost a decade ago, checks out in my experience
    by ftchd
  • 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.
    by Fraterkes
  • > 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

    by tosh
  • Idk, using the same file I got mpv: 144mb, vlc: 144mb.

    Reccomendations for other lower ram solutions?

    by goodmythical
  • 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.

    by wvbdmp
  • 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.
    by y-c-o-m-b
  • Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?
    by IronWolve
  • mpv
    by adjfasn47573
  • These days you can just install SMPlayer and have all the codecs bundled in the player.
    by trivialities777
  • It stopped being a thing about 10 years ago.

    Mostly because everything is H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, MP3 or AAC.

    by dist-epoch
  • 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.
    by accrual
  • 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.

    by jjcm
  • Which barrier?
    by prmoustache
  • 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.
    by bigstrat2003
  • 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.

    by contextfree