A Brief History of Windows Media Player

The first media player that Microsoft had with its Windows operating system was back in the early 90s. Of course, at the time, it wasn’t known as Media Player. The OS came equipped with MultiMedia Extensions, and MCI was used to play audio, with some limited video capabilities. Of course, MP3s weren’t widespread at this time, and was mostly used to play audio CDs.

Media Player wasn’t able to handle a lot of files that users wanted to access with their computers, so Microsoft had included a separate piece of software called ActiveMovie (which eventually became DirectShow). With future installments of DirectShow, it originally had the development name of “Media Player 2.” As future developments of DirectShow (getting into versions 5, 6, etc), the name was finally dropped and was integrated with Media Player. So, instead of having two programs (one which offered limited functionality and one which offered greater features and file compatibility), now there was just the one. This revamped Windows Media Player was now being offered with Windows 98, 2000, ME, and XP and began to offer codecs to play different file formats (such as MP3, amongst other various video files).

Different versions of Windows XP contained different versions of Windows Media Player. Versions that came with SP2 came with Media Player version 9 or 10. Version 11 is now widely used across Windows XP, and comes with Windows Vista. Testing and planning is now underway for Version 12, which will be made widely available in Windows 7.

Users can access the Media Player 2 by going to the “Run” command found in the Start Menu. From there, just type in “mplayer2” and click on “OK.” It can play back most media files, and has a cleaner look that a lot of users prefer over the flashier, more graphic-heavy later versions that Media Player has become.