Windows Media Center - RIP

MS today confirmed that the Windows Media Center app will not ship with Windows 10, effectively putting a final dagger into a product they stopped developing some 6 years ago...  Almost two years ago now I posted an article titled HTPC - RIP when I finally killed off the last of my Windows Media Center devices and sold my extenders and TV Cards off on Ebay...   

 MS has had a really mixed past when it comes to playing basic media files, from Music to Movies, to DVDs, etc.  In Windows XP, you had Media Player, then Media Center came along with a lot of ambitious plans around TV and Movie Libraries, etc - that peaked in about 2008 or 2009...   and it's been downhill ever since.  I remember reading MS Blogs about Media Center where MS folks themselves were saying go buy Plex or some other software.   

 I bought into the hype back in 2005 and like so many tried to make Media Center and Media Center extenders work as a whole home media streaming solution only to be horribly disappointed with the results and lack of support from MS.   There was a whole community out there trying to make this work and there were transcoders, media library add ons, you name it and the hardware players jumped right in adding TV Cards, building Windows Home Servers (also a huge disappointment..)  

 And then there was Zune - the predecessor to today's Music and Videos apps - which like many agree was a much better app than those new versions.

What made me laugh with today's announcement is that MS stated they will work on future support for DVDs in Windows 10.  What a joke...  It's a shame that MS is simply too cheap to build in the proper codecs for playing DVD movies into the OS.  They should have done it years ago...   now - who cares...

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