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...

I think what I find fascinating about this is it's a native app with no web version... and they still decided to write it in html/js. This is after Microsoft's commitment to rebuild things in WinUI.

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the barrier of friction that native presents compared to html/js, but that barrier has lowered so much with the advent of agentic development. It just feels like things weren't thought out.

I kinda have to hand it to Microsoft for dogfooding vibecoding with Copilot to such an extent. You can't say they encourage their customers to use a bad solution while doing something different in-house.

I don't think I've ever voluntarily used their shitty media player since the classic version. MPC-BE (some folks use MPC-HC) is my goto with VLC as a backup if certain codecs don't play nice with it. I'm able to use nVidia super resolution with them as well.

Why is that HEVC video extension is required?

As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expect them to include into price of the GPUs with hardware support i.e. all of them made in the last decade.

Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?

> The modern Media Player is said to use around 377MB of RAM when idle, compared to roughly 103MB for the old player—about 3.5x as much memory while doing absolutely nothing.

even 103MB sound like a lot for doing nothing

What? I can find at least one article from 2018 about HEVC being pay-walled? [0]

EDIT: Also, what do they mean by "new" Media Player? It shipped in 2022 [1]. This article is garbage. The source article [2] is fine.

[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-v...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022)

[2]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-w...

Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?

HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.

Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.

HEVC used to be a capped license per organization, so not providing it in the OS seems really harmful and expensive. Has the cap changed recently?

Didn't they just publicly make an apology for enshitting Windows over the last years, and committed to go back to building native app?

I understand that project might have started way before the public statement but it really doesn't look good from a PR standpoint.

For everything except sabotage-ware rootkit based games, Linux is the better solution for basically everything.

Running MS Windows these days is like having a "kick me, hard" sign on your back. Or, you're treated like a money and data piñata.

A solution for AC-3 is to get Dolby Digital Plus decoder for PC OEMs from here:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_inst...

and then you recieve the latest update from windows store.

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M$ knows the laws will change in their favor requiring a gov ID to boot a computer. This is how they will get away with crap like this.