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  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
    by orthoxerox
  • 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...

    by est31

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