Windows Media Player Outstanding Functionality and Versatility Forrest Stroud
Outstanding Functionality and Versatility
In addition to support for NetShow 3.0 content, Media Player also offers support for the following formats - streaming media for NetShow 2.x (Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) and ASX files) and RealMedia 4.0 (RA, RAM, RM, and RMM files); video content for Audio Visual Interleave (AVI), QuickTime (MOV and QT), and MPEG (MPG, MPEG, MP2, MPA, and MPE); music clips in the Musical Instrument Digital Interface format (MIDI, MID, and RMI); and audio sound bytes for Macintosh AIFF Resource (AIF, AIFC, and AIFF), Sun Microsystems and NeXT Java (AU and SND), and Audio for Windows (WAV) files.
Full MP3 support is a new addition to the Media Player that keeps it competitive with other audio/video streaming tools like RealPlayer and Winamp. A companion development tool for the Media Player, Windows Media On-Demand Producer, is also available to help you encode audio and video files to the streaming ASF format. One of the Media Player's coolest features is its codec auto-download capabilities. The player automatically downloads new codecs from Microsoft and third parties as they become available, ensuring that you will always have the latest and greatest codecs at hand for your viewing pleasure
