Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2

[Preppy Veteran]

Doubtful on the reason for the hanging around in memory - it's usually pretty trivial to kill an Internet connection attempt - that should take less than a second. If you're hitting a hang on shutdown, it's almost invariably WMP trying to close driver/device handles as should reflect an issue in the associated driver/device. That's a great thing to follow up on actual product support about - it's too nebulous / machine-specific of an issue (I don't see it on any of my fleet of boxes) to really deal with abstractly.

The stores things has been around since WMP started having stores/services (various versions ago). Select Work Offline or just block WMP if you're anti-whatever. I get where you're coming from - Work Offline (or explicit firewall block if you want it that way) gives you what you want. MS has dedicated privacy teams looking this stuff over. I respect some people have profoundly different definitions of what they want, and Work Offline or etc give you what you want.

And hey: I'm not management, and I'm here as a friend on my own time. I have no ability to affect anything beyond bug fixes, really, and a bug report/feature request I submit is typically substantially less valued than one that comes in through actual product support. Sorry if you're unclear about that. Right now I'm fixing stuff - I'm not going to have time to politic for stuff until it's too late to matter. So if you're trying to make some design change happen, contact actual technical support. :)

[nekrosoft13]

hang around shutdown just started with beta2, going from beta 1 to beta 2 nothing else changed with the system.

so i would call that a bug.

you haven't really explained why is it connecting to walmart etc.. when i selected urge to be the primary store.

[Favorable7404]

Anyone knows how to remove the album art? I delete it in Tag Editor for each track but it's still on the album cover.

[nekrosoft13]

Anyone knows how to remove the album art? I delete it in Tag Editor for each track but it's still on the album cover.

find it here

C:\Documents and Settings\{your user name}\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS

speaking of that, thats another bug!, why it never clear the cache?

lets say i have album A, i delete that album, and yet the covers stay in the cache

i had over 5 files in that cache, some of them was the same cover over and over

Edited September 3, 2006 by nekrosoft13

[nekrosoft13]

i meant to say over 5,000 files, not 5

[Hafnium]

Zachdms, thanks for taking your time to answer all these issues!

I have another issue, which I hope you can sort out...

When using the "paste album art" feature the album art is updated nicely "superficially". However, when checking more closely, it seems that the art is copied to the "C:\documents and settings\"active user"\...media player\...art cache\" folder only. That is a problem for two related reasons:

1. When maintaining a computer with multiple user accounts accesing the same media, users different from the user pasting the album art will not see the album art.

2. It ruins alot of the otherwise great Media Center Extender experience, which also relies on different user accounts (MCX# accounts).

Also, this is problem when reinstalling, since the C: drive is wiped, and all album art is lost.

I've tried to use the "Apply Media Information Changes" function, but that does not help!

In general, it seems that changes in performed to a local user account is rarely reflected in MCX accounts. So if you for instance update metadata for a track on your PC, the changes are not seen when accessing the media center from my Xbox360.

Thanks!

[tomwarren Veteran]

Surely, like in previous WMP versions it connects to the online stores to pull of the latest name of the store, picture associated and URL for store. What's the big issue with it doing that now when it's been doing that since version 8?

[Hafnium]

Surely, like in previous WMP versions it connects to the online stores to pull of the latest name of the store, picture associated and URL for store. What's the big issue with it doing that now when it's been doing that since version 8?

The problem is that not every album is available online, and even if it is, sometimes the album art is missing. This is especially true for non-English albums. Even when buying music through online stores, metadata as well as album art is rarely complete/consistent...

[Saadu]

I miss right clicking from list pane and selecting "Find album info". At the moment it doesnt seem to kick in when done from single tracks from the now playing list, but do it from library album then it tries to implement them one by one. Improvement could be to mass apply them somehow based on lets say track numbers from cd rips. I try to pull that info right before ripping but even its not available track numbers are, wmp should be able to correlate them with album name.

[HistoricalNeowin]

Zach, i have the same issue as nekro on two machines, when i try to uninstall it takes a second to do it, tells me its done the rollback, but it lies :) It doesnt do anything and doesnt remove the entrie from add/remove programs. On both machines in uninstalled via the hidden folders in the windows folder, one machine i managed to rollback to wmp10 and left it on that, the other, i get WMP is not installed properly and now have no wmp :)

Not blaming you just thought it might be of use to you to know that.

[nekrosoft13]

Surely, like in previous WMP versions it connects to the online stores to pull of the latest name of the store, picture associated and URL for store. What's the big issue with it doing that now when it's been doing that since version 8?

the problem is, well problems

1) when i run a video file, it shouldn't be updating album art.

2) starting with beta2, when i close (red x) WMP, it doesn't close, it hangs around in in the background for about 10-15 seconds.

for example. i open video A, for a quick preview, ok, "close" the program, go to video B, try to open it, and what happens? nothing, WMP doesn't open. why because its already running

like i said before, this started with BETA 2!

[Preppy Veteran]

Zach, i have the same issue as nekro on two machines, when i try to uninstall it takes a second to do it, tells me its done the rollback, but it lies :) It doesnt do anything and doesnt remove the entrie from add/remove programs. On both machines in uninstalled via the hidden folders in the windows folder, one machine i managed to rollback to wmp10 and left it on that, the other, i get WMP is not installed properly and now have no wmp :)

Not blaming you just thought it might be of use to you to know that.

It sounds like you either were running an old version of Crap Cleaner or some other 3rd party utility that destroyed the WMP uninstall/rollback files. Crap Cleaner fixed their code to not do this in their current release, but I've heard rumor that some other utility is also stomping on the WMP rollback files located under %windir%\$NTUninstallWMP11$ . Without those files, if you forcibly rollback by directly running that command, your system will get in a strange state. It sounds like that's what you ran into... ?

[littlepitel]

zachdms, any idea when we'll see an updated beta2 version compatible with Windows XP MCE?

[Preppy Veteran]

Any question about "when" is typically going to be one I'm not going to able to answer. If there were or were not plans to do anything ever, I couldn't say anything about those plans. Period. I can only tell you what you already know, plus or minus some explanations about why it works the way it does currently. Speculation on the future would get me shot, and I don't want that. :)

I'm not sure I understand the question. WMP11 should work fine on current MCE systems. Old MCE systems that the installer says "You're not compatible" for -- yeah, they aren't compatible and would choke and die on the updated Format SDK. The fix for that is to get an updated MCE OS.

[Stokkolm]

Do you need to uninstall beta 1 before installing beta 2?

[ViperAFK]

no it installs fine over beta 1

[Shadrack]

Is streaming improved at all from WMP10?

[D!rtySh@dy]

I haven't found the French version yet...only beta 1 :(

[b0m8er]

Updated to Beta 2, and I think it's faster than Beta 1 ;) Good job Microsoft (Y)

[NetShaker]

I haven't found the French version yet...only beta 1 :(

No, only US at the moment :(

[HistoricalNeowin]

It sounds like you either were running an old version of Crap Cleaner or some other 3rd party utility that destroyed the WMP uninstall/rollback files. Crap Cleaner fixed their code to not do this in their current release, but I've heard rumor that some other utility is also stomping on the WMP rollback files located under %windir%\$NTUninstallWMP11$ . Without those files, if you forcibly rollback by directly running that command, your system will get in a strange state. It sounds like that's what you ran into... ?

I haven't ever had crap cleaner and haven't run anything like ad-aware since i tried installing wmp11 so not really sure how it occured. I did previously have wmp11 beta 1 btw.

[jd957]

I haven't found the French version yet...only beta 1 :(

try the following for the french version.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...p;qstechnology=

[D!rtySh@dy]

:no: not the beta 2.

[Hafnium]

Zachdms, thanks for taking your time to answer all these issues!

I have another issue, which I hope you can sort out...

When using the "paste album art" feature the album art is updated nicely "superficially". However, when checking more closely, it seems that the art is copied to the "C:\documents and settings\"active user"\...media player\...art cache\" folder only. That is a problem for two related reasons:

1. When maintaining a computer with multiple user accounts accesing the same media, users different from the user pasting the album art will not see the album art.

2. It ruins alot of the otherwise great Media Center Extender experience, which also relies on different user accounts (MCX# accounts).

Also, this is problem when reinstalling, since the C: drive is wiped, and all album art is lost.

I've tried to use the "Apply Media Information Changes" function, but that does not help!

In general, it seems that changes in performed to a local user account is rarely reflected in MCX accounts. So if you for instance update metadata for a track on your PC, the changes are not seen when accessing the media center from my Xbox360.

Thanks!

Lesson learned: Flattery will get you nowhere!

[nekrosoft13]

i need to call MS again tomorrow, they better fix this hanging in memory issue