Windows Media Player 12

Windows Media Player 12, developed by Microsoft, is the latest release of Windows Media Player. It was first introduced in October 2008 at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference and has been released as part of the Windows 7 operating system.
New features
Windows Media Player 12 adds native support for H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 2 video formats, AAC audio and 3GP, MP4 and MOV container formats.
Microsoft has recognized AVCHD as one of the popular implementations of H.264 encoding scheme, and has file extensions M2TS and .mts pre-registered in the system. Windows Media Player is able to index content of these files, while Windows Explorer is capable of creating thumbnails for each clip.
The user interface has been redesigned such that the Now Playing view plays media in a separate minimalist window with floating playback controls, and also gives access to the current playlist, visualizations, and enhancements. , albeit minus the volume control function, track and album information shown whenever a new song is played and the progress bar.
The taskbar icon also supports jump lists introduced in Windows 7.
Media streaming features
While previous versions streamed media to UPnP compliant devices (Digital Media Server role) and could play media by fetching it from a network share (Digital Media Player role) , Windows Media Player 12 can access media from the shared media libraries on the network or HomeGroup, stream media to DLNA 1.5 compliant devices and allows itself (once the remote control option is turned on) to be remotely controlled by Digital Media Controller devices which stream media (Digital Media Renderer role). The thumbnail preview which replaces this lacks volume control and a progress bar. The ability to start the miniplayer only for certain files based on specific text in their file names was also removed.
* The Advanced Tag Editor (ID3 tag editor), which allowed users to edit metadata for media files file, is removed. The tags can still be edited en-masse by displaying the tag column in the Library, selecting a group of tracks and left-clicking the tag to edit, or by installing a third-party tag editor, for instance the Windows Media Player Plus! add-in. The user can also still edit the tags from Windows Explorer by right-clicking Properties on the file to edit and selecting the Details pane.
* The ability to add and show static lyrics and synchronized lyrics.
* The "Party Mode", "Color Chooser" and "Media Link for E-mail", features present in previous versions of Windows Media Player, have been removed in version 12.
* The context menu entry "Find In Library" which allowed locating the Now Playing song in the Windows Media Player library was removed. The context menu command "Open file location" can be used to locate the song in the Windows 7 Music library.
* The option to adjust the bit rate when burning data CDs has been removed.
* The options to use the overlay mixer, video mixing renderer (VMR-7) or high quality mode (VMR-9) has been removed.
* Enhancements are only accessible from Now Playing view in a floating window. They do not dock to the Now Playing window, and do not get restored when Windows Media Player is restarted. Even when manually restored, their position does not get saved.
* Several player preferences are not saved and restored upon restarting the player. The playlist pane in Now Playing view is not shown automatically unlike previous versions. Enhancements do not get restored when Windows Media Player is restarted. Even when manually restored, the previous position of the Now Playing window and enhancements is not retained.
* The ability to index monitored folders in a background service. This makes it necessary to manually open the GUI on the server to index content for streaming.
* The 'Now Playing' item in the Library Tree (between Playlists and Library while songs are playing) has been removed removing the possibility of easily displaying (and overall editing) additional columns while listening.
* The capacity of directly editing a playing item by removing both the Advanced Tag Editor and the Now Playing library item.
* The BPM column

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See Also

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