'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers' is an unacceptable tradeoff, they deserve the backlash.

The HEVC support is free is you know the "secret" link:

ms-windows-store://pdp?productId=9N4WGH0Z6VHQ

It's a wide know workaround, been there for years, obviously Microsoft pretends they don't know about it.

https://www.howtogeek.com/680690/how-to-install-free-hevc-co...

> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps

I mean, I agree, but Microsoft of all companies really should be invested in building Windows native applications. If they can't be fucked to build Windows-native applications, why would anyone else?

Microsoft should be setting the example, and the high bar of what Windows-native quality software should be. It's frankly embarrassing for them that they can't or won't do it.

If Google and Apple also decided to remove support for common video formats instead of just paying the slightly higher licensing fee, I might have some sympathy.

Microsoft thinks they have all the money in the world when it comes to wasting huge sums on mergers and acquisitions that go nowhere. Spend some on maintaining the user experience.

Also, with Dell and others releasing new Windows laptops with 8 Gigs of RAM, needless memory bloat is unacceptable.

Wouldn't HEVC licences already be paid by the hardware/gpu vendors on most devices? And Microsoft just exposes api for that hardware?

Is this just for a purely software implementation of it?

It must be possible these days to allow designers to prototype UIs in WebTech and then convert it to native code.

> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily

Ah yes, we don't want Microsoft to run out of JavaScript developers to keep improving their desktop operating system in this manner. More webdevs, that's what's going to fix what ails Windows!

At this point they could direct some AI to vibe rewrite every UI code in Win32 and MFC and it'd still be vastly better than crap they push us.

>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

Can someone explain to me why these multi operating system app building tools don’t compile down to native code and leverage native APIs? Is there nothing like that available?

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here.

Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.

HEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.

There are 100s of processes running on my Windows without starting anything explicitly. They are using more than 10 gb of RAM. I am already feeling the consequences of this sloppiness. Especially that my IDE/compiler/emulator easily use 20+ GB. My 32 GB of memory is not enough somehow…

There is a lot of professional software that locks people in also.

It does not matter how well or poorly Chrome mismanages memory, 400MB is still 400MB. If that 400MB is 10% of the free RAM after the share the OS takes, then that is a hefty toll. And the regular updates Windows 11 users are getting are famously not providing value, but taking value away. Case in point right here is the new media player.

IME, there is a negative correlation “justifies increased memory consumption by citing DX” and “ships code with fewer critical issues.”

It's not about the code. The open source implementations are also subject to patent laws, they just ignore them and put the responsibility on the user. And users don't know/care about it so in the end they get playback for free.

That is why some distributions (RHEL derivatives, for example) do not ship support for many codecs out of the box and they make you jump to (admittedly simple) hoops to get it working.

VideoLAN wants you to pay the royalty for x265 and you'll get sued by patent pools if you use it in a company (and are big enough).

A single Chrome tab does not use gigabytes. In fact, this app IS a Chrome tab! It's web based, so it's using Edge, which is just Chrome in a trenchcoat.

No, no and no.

Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit.

Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.

How come I have never seen this tradeoff work in practice?

There is no nuance in 400%...

The problem is that it does not. At all.

x265 is an encoder, not a decoder. Also, being open source doesn't matter here: an open source library, even with a patent grant, doesn't give you a license to someone else's patents.

Which barrier?

Still vastly prefer mpv[0].

0. https://mpv.io

PotPlayer is the new kid, I guess? Personally I don't like VLC because of the UI, so I've always used MPC.

MPC is better if you're on Windows.

These days you can just install SMPlayer and have all the codecs bundled in the player.

It stopped being a thing about 10 years ago.

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

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/

So it started sucking almost a decade ago, checks out in my experience

mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people

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.

Can't wait for said professional software to eventually decide that Electron's the way to go as well, and make shittier new versions, but cross-platform.

(I don't know if this can be sarcasm anymore.)

What is Windows's moat among the business crowd? Is it the "can't get fired if they buy Windows" mantra?

(Well, now they can get laid off anyway.)

From CS101 it’s called virtual memory. Things get swapped in and out of memory when they need to. An extra 200MB of memory when Chrome takes gigabytes of memory is a petty thing to complain about.

How much do you want to bet you don’t even use windows media player? It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.

You see it all the time in Slack, Discord and so on.

Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?

Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant

Ugh... for the life of me I still can't understand why you can't click to play pause in VLC. Probably once upon a time it was about dvd, but the number of played dvds compared to pirated mk4 is probably one to a billion.

It's nice to see that someone revived MPC-HC (again). For a while MPC-BE[1] was the alternative. I don't know how they compare today, but the latter is still great.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/

Agreed, Media player classic is the Winamp of video.

The article mentions W11 24H2 but that might have been the only update the article had if it was first published much earlier. Might have even been an advance warning about AC-3 even before 24H2 was released.

Otherwise looks a bit deceptively like new findings just because the date at the top of the page says June 18, 2026 :\

Windows media player always sort of sucked. I remember when I discovered mplayer. What a breath of fresh air by comparison. ostensibly worse, with it's barely there user interface. But... all it did was play video, it would play anything, no more faffing about with installing codecs or different programs for different formats. No annoying ui that tried too hard to look like a piece of hi-fi gear.

I am not sure exactly what happened to it, it's maintainer moved on to other projects I imagine, it's current equivalent is probably mpv

There's https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net for Windows lusers.

SMPplayer is a frontend for mpv which I use and like.

Being Electron doesn't mean that the developer will release builds for all platforms that Electron supports. Discord took 3 years, for example.

> What is Windows's moat among the business crowd?

The moat is that it just works[1] will all of their software developed over the past 30 years, and support contracts/staff[2] is incredibly easy to obtain.

1. Contrarians will say that wine has better backwards compatibility than windows, but that's just cope and limited to a handful of games (and even then it's only because people made elaborate compatibility profiles for those specific games, those won't exist for internal apps).

2. Linux sysadmins are easy to obtain, but dedicated staff to support a desktop linux fleet is still fairly niche. There is some overlap in skillset and sysadmins can learn, of course.

If I understand correctly, most of what K-Lite / CCCP did was wrapping libavcodec/libavformat for the Windows APIs, so native players could use them. VLC just ships with libavcodec included, so it supports all these formats. Not sure about MPC-HC nowadays (it used to use Windows APIs, but you’d usually get it with your codec pack installer anyway).

Yep, highly recommend https://www.smplayer.info with dark skin :)

K-lite originally was a giant mess of stuff that gradually got pruned down as the libav-based things got better and covered more of what was needed. These days it's just mpc-hc plus lavfilters and a few incidental tools.

It also has MPC GUI mode for nostalgia :)

On macOS, IINA is my go-to mpv wrapper nowadays, and last time I tried, Haruna is pretty good on KDE.