I first laid eyes on Window's new revision of their Media Player when I was at a friend's apartment one night. Right off, I noticed that even though I was watching the same mpeg music video that I had at home on my machine, this video my friend had on his PC looked much much better. The video quality of mpeg videos appears to definitely benefit from the use of the new beta 7 Media Player. However, for some reason, I still kind of miss the old media player...

First off, there's still lots of problems in this build (yeah, I know, it's a beta version). For example, there are times (quite frequently) when I'll open a video and not be able to move the scroller at the bottom of the console to skip through to a particular section. For example, let's say you open up a 5 minute video and you don't particularly care about the first 2 minutes--okay, let's move the scrollbar so you can skip to a later part. In this build of Media Player, if you drag on the scrollbar, sometimes it won't budge and you'll end up bringing the video back to the first frame... The only solution I found for this is to shut down the program entirely and then restart it.

I also don't particularly like Media Player beta 7 because of it's interface and full console look. Maybe I'm just used to the original compact view of the original program where only the video is shown on your screen. With beta 7, there's something called "full mode"--a large window which displays not only your video screen but also a stack of menuing buttons to the left that I'd really would have preferred to not be there.

True, I don't have to use the full mode at all--I can always use compact mode or classic mode. But the problem with compact mode is you can only view your videos at a zoom of 100%. Any larger a zoom, parts of your video will be outside of the compact view frame and unviewable. It also seems that with classic mode, even though you can bypass the zoom size problem, the quality of videos doesn't look as nice as that of full mode or compact mode. So I guess I'm stuck with full mode...

I also don't really like the skins for beta 7 (again, I must mention this is primarily because I've been an avid user of the original version that was bundled with Windows). These windows take up too much space on my screen even in compact mode and are slightly distracting (like the "toothy" skin--what were the artists thinking?? or wait--is that programmer art?! no offense...). I also find it strange that if I drag my console around on my desktop while there's a video loaded, the video screen will always drag along a bit slower then the rest of the console.

Quite honestly, if it weren't for the enhanced video quality feature of this new build, I would have uninstalled this puppy after a few uses. Hopefully the next build will offer some fixes.



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