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.
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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
Windows 11 is not free software. Apple macOS, iOS, ipadOS all support HEVC and Dolby because Apple pays licensing costs, likewise Microsoft should do the same for Windows users, it is not free OS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I rarely use widows, but i feel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player. Most people dont play local videos anyway, and those who do use something else like VLC.
> 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.
As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expect them to include into price of the GPUs with hardware support i.e. all of them made in the last decade.
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.
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).
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
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 :\
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.
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.
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?
The "power user" group which was traditionally completely Windows users is seeing some shifts to Linux. Linus Tech Tips' recent Linux switch tests went really well for Linux:
I think Media Player is there just to have a built in option. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone use it, even non-techies install some other player in my experience.
The lack of codecs takes us back 20 years when everyone was installing codec packs. Both the Dolby and HEVC extensions now come from alternative codec packs. Not a real problem but does signal a degradation of the experience to the level that was usually considered the “downside” for Linux.
Always a good idea to run alternatives to every software that might pull the rug from under you. Always be ready to switch when the experience starts to stink.
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...
'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers' is an unacceptable tradeoff, they deserve the backlash.
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.
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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.
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?
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...
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 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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
Windows 11 is not free software. Apple macOS, iOS, ipadOS all support HEVC and Dolby because Apple pays licensing costs, likewise Microsoft should do the same for Windows users, it is not free OS.
I don’t recall ever having a good time using a native Mac OS video player.
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.
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.
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.
Which barrier?
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.
I rarely use widows, but i feel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player. Most people dont play local videos anyway, and those who do use something else like VLC.
> 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
Why is that HEVC video extension is required?
As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expect them to include into price of the GPUs with hardware support i.e. all of them made in the last decade.
Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?
These days you can just install SMPlayer and have all the codecs bundled in the player.
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.
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).
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It stopped being a thing about 10 years ago.
Mostly because everything is H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, MP3 or AAC.
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...
So it started sucking almost a decade ago, checks out in my experience
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
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 :\
Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?
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/
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.
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.
mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people
SMPplayer is a frontend for mpv which I use and like.
2 replies →
There's https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net for Windows lusers.
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.
Didn't they just publicly make an apology for enshitting Windows over the last years, and committed to go back to building native app?
I understand that project might have started way before the public statement but it really doesn't look good from a PR standpoint.
HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.
Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.
HEVC used to be a capped license per organization, so not providing it in the OS seems really harmful and expensive. Has the cap changed recently?
For everything except sabotage-ware rootkit based games, Linux is the better solution for basically everything.
Running MS Windows these days is like having a "kick me, hard" sign on your back. Or, you're treated like a money and data piñata.
There is a lot of professional software that locks people in also.
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.)
A solution for AC-3 is to get Dolby Digital Plus decoder for PC OEMs from here:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_inst...
and then you recieve the latest update from windows store.
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The "power user" group which was traditionally completely Windows users is seeing some shifts to Linux. Linus Tech Tips' recent Linux switch tests went really well for Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQFgWdiudo
Linux on the desktop is close, and Windows is getting a lot lot worse.
I switched to OpenSUSE this year. Good bye, Torment Nexus.
Sadly you have to install the codecs from external sites.
This - at least for me - messes up the rolling release stuff at least one a month.
I think Media Player is there just to have a built in option. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone use it, even non-techies install some other player in my experience.
The lack of codecs takes us back 20 years when everyone was installing codec packs. Both the Dolby and HEVC extensions now come from alternative codec packs. Not a real problem but does signal a degradation of the experience to the level that was usually considered the “downside” for Linux.
Always a good idea to run alternatives to every software that might pull the rug from under you. Always be ready to switch when the experience starts to stink.
M$ knows the laws will change in their favor requiring a gov ID to boot a computer. This is how they will get away with crap like this.