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.