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.
Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses. The practical difference between 370MB and 100MB is basically nil for any normal workload. It affects nothing but how many unlikely-to-be-used files fit in the page cache.
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.
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.
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.
Chrome does it, so it must be good? Is a extra 200mb going to cause the computer to choke? probably not, but that doesn't mean people cant complain about the fact that a lot of modern software has gone this route and it all does add up.
VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP.
More directly, do you not find it odd and embarrassing for a tech giant to be unable to beat a bunch of volunteers? I mean, ffmpeg famously hand-writes a lot of assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
> VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP.
Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
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…
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.
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.
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?
Microsoft has written more application development frameworks than you can shake a stick at. They've also failed to gain traction with virtually all of them, even internally.
I believe, at this point they could direct AI to vibe rewrite every UI code written after 2010 in Win32 and MFC and the result would still be vastly better than crap they push us nowadays.
> 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.
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.
This app is a reskinned Groove Music, it was mostly written back in the early Windows 10 days (2014-2017) and long predates Copilot/etc. Even the Windows 11 rebrand as Media Player (2022?) predates that stuff, and it's barely been touched since then.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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).
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.
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 :\
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 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.
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.
This article is likely AI slop, none of this is "news" and I'm pretty sure that this is just factually Not Accurate. Windows 11 is not shipping a new media player, it has the same one as it has since Win10. Codecs have like HEVC/H.265 always cost a very small amount of money, in order to pay patent owners. Again, it has done this for years now.
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?
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.
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.
Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses. The practical difference between 370MB and 100MB is basically nil for any normal workload. It affects nothing but how many unlikely-to-be-used files fit in the page cache.
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.
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.
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.
Chrome does it, so it must be good? Is a extra 200mb going to cause the computer to choke? probably not, but that doesn't mean people cant complain about the fact that a lot of modern software has gone this route and it all does add up.
> VLC
VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP.
More directly, do you not find it odd and embarrassing for a tech giant to be unable to beat a bunch of volunteers? I mean, ffmpeg famously hand-writes a lot of assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
> VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP.
Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
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…
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.
People try to use Windows 11 with 4GB of RAM?
I doubt that's viable, honestly... At that point, just don't use microslop software
IME, there is a negative correlation “justifies increased memory consumption by citing DX” and “ships code with fewer critical issues.”
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.
There is no nuance in 400%...
Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant
That's how it started though, it's a slippery slope :\
How come I have never seen this tradeoff work in practice?
You see it all the time in Slack, Discord and so on.
Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?
The problem is that it does not. At all.
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.
It doesn't use JS/TS, it's a reskinned Groove Music and is all either C++ or C# (I think C#) + UWP/WinUI2 XAML
Xbox Music in Windows 8.x was actually web tech based, but was rewritten into C# and XAML when it was turned into Groove Music in Windows 10
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?
Nah. Search for "Nokia h264" and see for yourself how they've sued like every single vendor in recent years, because they want to double dip.
>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?
Microsoft has written more application development frameworks than you can shake a stick at. They've also failed to gain traction with virtually all of them, even internally.
I believe, at this point they could direct AI to vibe rewrite every UI code written after 2010 in Win32 and MFC and the result would still be vastly better than crap they push us nowadays.
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.
> 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!
It must be possible these days to allow designers to prototype UIs in WebTech and then convert it to native code.
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.
QuickTime is fine. It does the basics, is intuitive, and fast.
As a certified MSFT's antifan, I’ve noticed Apple’s Music.app uses roughly 580 MiB of RAM for comparison.
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.
This app is a reskinned Groove Music, it was mostly written back in the early Windows 10 days (2014-2017) and long predates Copilot/etc. Even the Windows 11 rebrand as Media Player (2022?) predates that stuff, and it's barely been touched since then.
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?
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.
> 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
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.
Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?
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).
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.
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.
mpv
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 :\
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.
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.
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/
If mpv on Linux and MPC-HC on Windows, what is recommended on macOS?
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
mpv is great for scripting, though.
SMPplayer is a frontend for mpv which I use and like.
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.
Yep, highly recommend https://www.smplayer.info with dark skin :)
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.
This article is likely AI slop, none of this is "news" and I'm pretty sure that this is just factually Not Accurate. Windows 11 is not shipping a new media player, it has the same one as it has since Win10. Codecs have like HEVC/H.265 always cost a very small amount of money, in order to pay patent owners. Again, it has done this for years now.
The rebrand of Groove Music to Media Player was a Windows 11 thing, so it sort of did ship a "new" media player.
HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.
Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.