Media Player

Windows Media Player - WMP has many other functions such as ripping music, organizing music, burning cd's and dvd's and a digital media asset management system. The player uses propietary formats such as the Windows Media Video - WMV and the Windows Media Audio - WMA. It also plays ASF - Advanced Systems Format

Current Version for Windows: Windows Media Player 11 Current Version for Mac: Windows Media Player 9 - further development has been discontinued since January 12th, 2006. Instead, Microsoft now offers a3rd party plugin called WMV Player or Flip4Mac, which allows for Windows Media to be viewed in Apple's QuickTime player. Apple users can also use the VLC media Player which also plays Windows media video (WMV).

Main Features:

• Plays digital media such as audio and video in various formats.
• Supports video streaming and local playback
• Support for all digital media codecs by using DirectX filters.
• Full digital media asset management, includes an integrated digital media library, which provides cataloging and media searching. But not as good as Itunes.
• the latest Windows Version - WMP 11 offers significant improvement and support for DirectX decoding of video in WMV format - DXVA decoding
• Supporrts WMA format transcoding.