New WMP 12 sounds like it will be a very nice player. The new feature it's going to have sound great. Here is the link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081030-hands-on-windows-media-player-12s-surprising-new-features.html

Glad to see that you no long have to separately download codecs to play "obscure" file formats like Divx, Xvid, H.264!

WMP 12 (testing from the 6801 W7 build) is very responsive and quick. But I realy miss some big features: - The big Album Art from WMP11

Now look how big the album art are shown on WMP 12 (Ps. I'm talking about a "beta" version - I'ts not the final version):

I will say that the lack of large art is disappointing.. maybe that will be fixed as I consider that a regression.

I have edited my post becouse the lyrics plug-in still works on WMP 12 beta.

No word about podcast support? Is this possible?

"It's not just libraries that are improved. WMP12 makes it easier to play back audio or video on remote devices, a feature dubbed "Play To." WMP12 can stream to other computers in your HomeGroup, so, for example, you can browse your library on your laptop but actually play back on the HTPC connected to your sound system."

This sounds like it might be close to the multi-zone audio we've been wanting???

My complaint in WMP is that I have videos in avi, mpg, and wmv.  But nowhere in those codecs can I specify a genre for the file, so that I can say "this is a TV Show," "this is a music video," or "this is a Movie."  Will I finally be able to categorize my video files?

James

JJohnson, on WMP you can select videos and some tag actions apeirs:

Ps. I realy don't know how to tag video files.. LOL

But notice that you can find videos by folders, and since vista I use folder division for my videos, basicly I have:

- Music Videos - Movies - Tv Shows - Shows - Family Videos

And that is how I find them on Media Center (divided by folders)

Ps. Notice that on WMP 12 you can make video playlists

Anyone get WMP 12 on Windows 7 to share out its avi files with an Xbox360? I have configured WMP12 to allow sharing, in the sharing settings I have configured the xbox to have access, and have added the folder hosting the avi's to allow WMP to see the files. On the xbox, I can browse the Win7 computer, and see the folder thats being shared out, but it doesnt see any files in the folder! These movies are on an external USB drive, so if I connect the drive to my Vista WMP 11 box, the xbox happily sees the folder and files, which are playable.

crilo:

No word about podcast support? Is this possible?

I see nothing about Podcasts in WMP12. Hopefully this will change in a later build. I hate having to have the Zune Software installed just to get decent Podcast support in Windows. Granted the Zune Software is nice, but it fights with WMP and plus I don't even have a Zune...

So, I'm having a huge problem with the library in WMP 12. I am not 100% sure, but music seems to be fine. I have all my music on a shared drive on my SBS2003. The machine is on the domain, properly registered. OK, for the music I guess. I also have all my pictures on that drive, on a separate share. Not too many, about 3200. I have set up the folder in the pics part of the library. Everytime I start WMP, it keeps scanning that folder, even though I'm pretty sure that all pic have been added to the library. I can play music or video, but after slightly more than five minutes...

...the machine DIES!

No BSOD, no warnings, nothing. Just dies, as if the plug was pulled. I have been going back and forth, so as I said I'm not sure, but if I remove the pics folder (with the result of no pics in 7MC), this behaviour stops, and all is fine. I am also quite sure that it only happens when in the library, cause I can watch movies if I start them from the file location (as opposed to through the library where I don't yet have set up any movies.) Strange thing is that I can run 7MC and browse through pictures there. It should be scanning for pics just as WMP 12, shouldn't it?

This baffels me and actually cripples the whole Windows 7 experience. I guess that's what you get when you jump on to pre-betas...

Anyone recognises this behaviour? It happens on all machines tested so far.

Edit: Now it just happened in 7MC as well. I browsed pics for a couple of minutes, all fine, then flipped through some TV channels, all fine, then choose to close - BANG - the machine died again. Something is not right...

just thinking of it from a hardware perspective, you sure you aren't overheating and have a good enough power supply? maybe the scanning a large library is taxing it somehow.

Actually, WMP is utilising quite a lot cpu resouce (varies up and down), but never near 100%. Also, it's the same machine that I ran Vista on, and it never happened there, and believe me I did tax that quite heavily. The same thing happened on my laptop, and the onboard GPU gets very hot with Vista, over 100 Celsius if you have it flat on a desk. Still works fine. However, there may be something with the power supply. Still, I though that 7 was supposed to consume less watts, but I may be wrong.

The main reason I doubt (but don't disregard) any such causes is that I have read other posts where people got a BSOD when first revving up the library in WMP. Thanks for the tip though, it is appreciated.

Is a codec for WTV format included as well?