Among the advanced that Windows Vista supposed, one of the most interesting was
Windows Media Player 11, the
multimedia player that the operating system integrated per default, and that was distributed for all the other Microsoft platforms.
A
completely renovated design that was integrated with the new Windows Vista interface was its main innovation, everything was completely minimized and stylized, where the menu bar disappeared (although it is accessible with a right click) and the most important options on big buttons. The forwards and backwards buttons, inherited from Internet Explorer, became a very useful tool to browse through the menus, and the inclusion of all the
play back controls together in the bottom of the interface improved its usability.
Moreover on a first look it was clear that
a lot more data could be viewed, due to the fact that the bottom left area is dynamic and shows information.
In what respects to the admitted formats,
Windows Media Player 11 is compatible with the most popular formats, and this selection of formats can easily be expanded by means of a
codec pack.
Like any modern
multimedia player, it allows us to manage our
music library and synchronize many portable players with it, and it can even be used to stream video to the
Xbox 360 to play any contents through it.
Windows Media Player 11 also allows to
rip a CD's audio to the WMA, MP3, WMAPro and WAV formats. And if we don't want to pass our CDs to digital format, we can also use the various online services that it includes to gather information about them.
Note: The first step for the installation of
Windows Media Player 11 is the Windows operating system validation test.