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.
> It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers
What's easiest for both users and developers is royalty-free video formats.
AV1 is solution to these video format licensing problems. Microsoft is part of the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/
Dolby has made direct threats to the royalty-free status of AV1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...
So Microsoft and all the AOMedia members will need to defend AV1 if they want it to remain royalty-free.
'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers'
That's how a lot of software gets done these days. More bloat, less features, lots of inconsistencies.
Perhaps the AI boom will encourage / subsidize(?) native development in a way? If it can be made more approachable, then maybe it would become more prevalent...
No, bad vendors will just use AI to reduce time-to-market, skimp on QC, or do the same with fewer developers.
This is a leadership problem, not a technical one.
Oh my dear sweet summer child
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.
A problem in isolation this is not, however. Large portions of Windows now have this same bloat in terms of executable filesize, runtime needed for basic functions, and RAM usage. Windows Media Player by itself might not be an issue, but it's part of a trend that now affects Explorer, Desktop Window Manager, and a bunch of other core components to the operating system.
Have you heard that there's a RAM shortage?
Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.
Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.
Considering the way Microsoft's product line is these days, I have a hard time believing its terabytes of "telemetry" go anywhere but the Windows equivalent of /dev/null.
I'd bet the kind of people who care about the RAM usage of their media player haven't used Windows Media Player in a decade and disable as much telemetry as they can.
And Microsoft has incentive to force users to upgrade because their computers need more RAM, disk, and CPU
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Nope, a comment that flippant about wasting RAM use deserves that snark. It's always been bad to do it, and it's even worse nowadays.
Ah, an alt account.
Now multiply that opinion by every application on your computer. Including the start bar and notepad.exe.
There's a special case argument to be made in favor of ignoring media player resource consumption, given the maximum number of ears and eyes per human.
I expect there's someone out there who tiles 10 instances of simultaneously playing audio/visual media, but that's not most of us.
Computers can execute multiple different programs at the same time, so users are able to run a media player while their main focus is on a different window, tile, monitor or whatever else.
Given that 8GB machines are still widely in use (and will get even more common over the next years), 250MB of extra RAM use is a pretty huge portion of user's available RAM pool, so this is quite a big change.
I normally don't have notepad.exe or the windows media player open, so it's irrelevant. Chrome, clangd, rustc, etc. are all that matter. Optimizing anything else fails the pareto principle. I definitely do not want Microsoft paying its engineers to optimize windows media player memory usage.
I don’t want a trillion dollar investment in ram reduction, but the fist 80% of optimisation will be trivially achieved. Microsoft have a conflict of interest given they also sell surface devices where pushing people to the more expensive models is beneficial, while also probably benefiting when other hardware manufacturers benefit too.
If all apps are developed with the same mindset, all of them would consume much more memory. Does the average user have a 3x buffer just in case? I doubt the median-ish 8GB is enough these days.
> Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses
Famous last words.
The price of RAM skyrocketed in the last months. The users will care.
Especially for a company the size of Microsoft.
The programs shipped with the OS should be exemplary versions of each thing.
I don’t know if that really is any different than any other time.
You do not know what unacceptable means. Everyone that uses or buys Windows “accepts” it. What you mean is that you don’t agree.
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.
> Things get swapped in and out of memory when they need to.
Great, so now that SSD I've got can wear out more quickly!
> It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.
Already do. My heart still aches for those who don't know any better.
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.
I really only enjoyed Windows Media Player for its visualizations. I found that VLC could get close, but not quite an exact match (most likely due to licensing); there's something quite entrancing about them, and how they'd move in time and change with the music.
It's come and gone, and I'm still not fully sure what Groove Music was; was it something to do with the Zune?
> 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.
The older I get the more volunteer software projects I donate to. VLC being one of them.
> 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.
then all you need is 64k
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…
I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building.
The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.
Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.
> webshitten
Thanks for this term, I vote for it to be the technical term of the last decade.
Not even microsoft can sink microsoft.
I feel you - the most annoying thing about this sort of bloat is just not being able to keep up with or identify everything that's running. Don't get me wrong, this can be a problem on MacOS or Linux, but it feels much more manageable in a *nix environment even though I grew up with DOS/windows.
Why would you use such a system?
Because no matter what a lot of people say here: you still need to be lucky to have a fully functioning system on Linux without continuous roadblocks everywhere. And I’m saying this after using Linux for more than a quarter of a century, occasionally as my main OS. I switched from it back just a few months ago, after I gave up to figure out how to have more uptime on battery for half a year, how to make my monitors with widely different DPIs work properly (literally without crashing the whole system), how to simply play a video reliably, and these just after solving a bunch of different issues already. And my lifestyle really doesn’t allow that battery drain issue at all.
Whats wrong with 100MB*100?
It’s funny, because I don’t expect more features from Windows than Windows XP, or let’s pretend that I need more security (I don’t, but I know a lot of folks need them), then Windows 7. But even those could have been reduced greatly. I remember that I could disable at least half of the services in XP without losing anything. Maybe the only features since back then which I use are proper DPI scaling, individual app sound level settings, and maybe the favorite folders in Explorer, but I’m not sure whether this later one didn’t exist back then.
If they would provide that (with security patches of course), then they wouldn’t need “quick startup” and other bullshits to make things “quicker”.
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
Windows 10 was viable with 4 GB, assuming you restricted yourself. Nowadays it mostly isn't, precisely because of things like this.
Windows Server 2022 comes up just fine in 4-8GB RAM disposable qubes. I can easily load Adobe MCCS6 applications in that. I can run Mathematica in that. I can load Siemens NX 10-12 in that and do basic modeling!
#StopTheBloat #StopTheOffshoring
I have a few Azure VMS running server 2022 with 2GB running as a controller. Works surprisingly well.
And you're running windows media player on these? I doubt that, so entirely unrelated to the fact that windows 11 does not, which is the OS the vibecoded slop media player is gonna be used on.
> This new software replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player across all Windows 11 PCs.
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.
Isn't Edge slightly more efficient than Chrome on Windows? Maybe it's changed, but that's always been what everyone has said.
Only in that they change the default settings to sleep tabs more aggressively. It's the same codebase.
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?
But… everyone thinks those are awful as well
There is no nuance in 400%...
Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant
1*4*[all programs on your computer] is very significant. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
That's how it started though, it's a slippery slope :\
Maybe a sales tax scaling with code size, memory use, and processor time for commercial software - a scale based on a 'model' computer that costs 3% of the median American's income - would disincentivise the shift to web languages, which has been happening because investors want to squeeze developers down to burger flipper pay levels.
Software made in 2005-2015 is no less capable than that today, except the lack of cloud cancer and AI gimmickry. "Downgrading" to those is actually a real upgrade today!
That would actually be like taxing or regulating the code itself, which could be pretty straightforward in proportion to its size and resource wastage.
I just think taxes have proven to be highly nonideal unless they are levied against some added-value being realized, but you're giving me ideas.
You could perhaps partially tax based on value too, but it could start to get confusing and unfair again.
Either way, taxes would probably turn out to be more of a parasite in terms of how it can overwhelm the value added if levies rise far beyond relative insignificance. Regardless of what good might come of it on the surface looking at the code.
The code itself is already regulated anyway, I would rather see a minor adjustment to the regulation where only code in an open-standard low-level language can be copyrighted.
You wouldn't even need to add enough taxes for negative incentive if the higher-level stuff was set free, that would unleash incredible resources.
That might be one of the most effective ways to reverse the exponential increase in resource-hogging, with greatest urgency.
Couldn't do it overnight, probably have to roll it back against a timeline, one layer at a time. Simulate the reversal of the metastization as logically as can be done from this point.
There's just no way we should have ever needed more than 100mb of C: drive space as long as you wanted to run your office with no further features than Windows 95 with Office 97. To be generous another 100mb for multimedia and another 100 for internet, plus the OS and Microsoft apps are supposed to get more efficient from there since they were rushed to market in the '90's themselves.
Gigabytes were supposed to be for storage and media files, and there was never supposed to be any latency of any kind as soon as processors got up to 1GHz and you got off dial-up. Mice with balls were all that was necessary too, and that was with IDE HDDs.
All you can do is weep for what could have been.
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.
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...
Your link says this doesn't work anymore?
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.
Probably there's not enough open source code to ~~steal~~ train the AI on for this to work. If they were to use Qt or GTK it'd work.
>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.
Leadership is weak.
As an operating system vendor, it should be a dismissable offence to refuse to use the OS standard APIs. Your products need to be the standard that other try to imitate.
WinUI2/UWP was heavily adopted internally though?* Most Windows shell UI and built-in apps use it at this point.
* (at least within the Windows organization; maybe not so much in other parts of Microsoft)
The web browser is a compiled program. The problem is that it’s a huge program.
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
> 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.
How do we live in a world where simultaneously "human coding is dead" and also "we need to trade performance for developer efficiency"? I thought code is free now?
Also--this is Microsoft! It's their OS!
Microsoft should just come out and say that the whole of Win32 is deprecated and kept around for legacy compatibility only, and all new software should be written in Electron. They're already acting that way, why not make it official?
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.
> 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.
> 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 modern native frontend APIs aren’t exactly lightweight themselves…
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).
probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices
/clutches pearls
Won't somebody think of the trillion-dollar companies!
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.
It’s been a few years since I tried but I think the codec support was pretty bad last time I checked. Sure it can play MOV files, but every time I tried to throw some pirated video at it it would choke.
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