Media is Still in the Dark Ages

I’ve long believed that the future of media playback on the desktop (or mobile device) would ultimately pass through Flash. Why there hasn’t been a truly universal, codec-neutral media player released for any operating system is beyond me. Lockergnome reader Anthony Baker submitted the following, in respect to the future of the Windows Media Player:

From what I can gather, there are high playback error rates with WMP (around 10%) that aren’t found during Flash playback (drops to 1%). Doesn’t seam like the problem is with the Windows Media codec for video itself, but the player. Methinks that Silverlight will be the answer to this, as they get around a lot of the playback problems in inherent in the current versions of the WMP. You get the video quality (which is, frankly, very good for streaming video) and a good playback.

The problem, of course, is that Silverlight doesn’t yet have the kind of adoption rate you need to formally ditch WMP for WMV playback, so they’re either stuck with what they’ve got, or they go Flash. As I recall, with the new version of MSN Video, playback has gone ALL Flash for the time being — specifically because of the great kind of playback performance they’re getting with Flash Video.

I’m fully expecting there to be an iPhone firmware update in the next few months that will include a Flash player with it. In related news, I just had the sucker “black screen” on me while I was trying to set up voicemail. Had I not been streaming live, nobody else would have heard how it was bungling my custom greeting recordings. Media is still in the dark ages, my friends.

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