- #Microsoft window media player download for mac update#
- #Microsoft window media player download for mac windows#
#Microsoft window media player download for mac windows#
Microsoft recommends Silverlight for Windows XP and Windows Vista. There are also QuickTime and RealPlayer versions for the Windows platform, although QuickTime tends to be played back from within the browser-and appears to continue in that direction, thanks to enhancements to QuickTime that are available in the iPhone and iPod Touch.įor cross-platform compatibility, including VC-1 and Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile, Microsoft created the Silverlight browser plug-in.
#Microsoft window media player download for mac update#
Windows Vista comes with a version of Windows Media Player that includes the SMPTE standard VC-1 codec Vista can also natively handle Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile playback, but a downloadable update for Windows XP is also available. The integrated player is Windows Media Player, and the choice of a player or plug-in really depends on which version of the Windows Media codec you are using and-to a lesser degree-what processor is in your playback machine.įor any version of the Windows Media Video 7, 8, the original Windows Media 9, or the Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile codec, the Windows Media Player can be used on Windows XP and Windows Vista. The Windows platform is the best supported for proprietary codecs, although standards-based codecs play equally well across all platforms. Understanding that several of these options span multiple computing platforms, but that most new viewers only use one computing platform, we're look at the player and plug-in options across platforms. With that in mind, let's look at a few of the options many viewers may encounter. The plug-in itself doesn’t necessarily play video, so developers then create a Flash- or Silverlight-capable embedded player to play video content in the browser. That thinking has remained consistent for a few years, with Microsoft launching Silverlight as a way to put Windows Media Player almost fully within the web browser (and spawning, with Adobe, a battle for a set of web technologies that may move to the desktop in what's termed rich internet applications or RIAs). After all, the reasoning went, many viewers will navigate to content via their web browser and want to watch the content directly within the browser, so no standalone player will ever be needed.
Many of these players then began to offer built-in support for viewing content directly from a web browser: QuickTime and Windows Media, for example, could automate the process of installing both a web browser plug-in and a new standalone player for first-time player users (or for users who were updating their player to get access to the latest codecs).įor new technologies, though, like Flash or Move, the need for an external player apart from the browser was a bit of overkill. Over time, and as new video and audio codecs came along, these standalone players were updated, some more than others. There were three dominant players: QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player. What do we mean by the terms players and plug-ins? In the early days, the battle in streaming (and in any desktop-video application, for that matter) centered on the players. Faced with all the options, and a desire to watch a history-making event, many first-time streamers I spoke to expressed delight at when they were able to watch the streams but frustration at the steps they had to go through to view that content. Record numbers of live streams from across the globe, many by new or infrequent viewers, meant that a large number of these viewers were also introduced to playback in a browser, which required a plug-in. Last week's presidential inauguration was a good example of this. The move to browser plug-ins, added on top of the earlier availability of multiple standalone players is, at the very least, confusing to those who seldom think about the technology that we use every day, except when they really want to watch a key event. Yet these same technologies are new to those who have never watched streaming video and, perhaps, even new to someone who last watched a video in a Windows Media Player several years ago. After being around the streaming media industry for any length of time, one thing we often take for granted is technology advancements that we use-mostly for convenience sake-to do our jobs.
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