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  Windows Media 9 Series reviewed
Time: 20:26 EST/01:26 GMT | News Source: SuperSite for Windows | Posted By: Todd Richardson

Thanks Jacques.
It's hard to ignore the fact that Microsoft has been on a roll lately. The company's current and upcoming products are vast, full-featured and in many cases, hard to explain simply because of the wealth of new and improved features they offer. I noted this problem in my Windows .NET Server 2003 review, and I'll add a similar caveat here as well. Windows Media 9 Series, a complete end-to-end platform for digital media solutions that spans every possible hardware platform touched by Windows products, is big. It's really big. It's going to affect virtually every Windows user, in ways that are exciting and fun. And I'm going to miss something important in this review, I can just feel it. There's just so much going on here.

So hang on, it's going to be a long ride, one that I'm splitting into multiple parts, and releasing over the next week sequentially. But before we get started with Part One, let's take a look back at the history of Microsoft's digital media efforts. In the early days, when companies such as Apple, with its Macintosh and QuickTime efforts, and Commodore, with its powerful multimedia Amiga systems, were literally making some serious noise, most PCs were capable only of simple beeps and bloops. It was an embarrassing state of affairs that was only partially solved by several proprietary DOS-based solutions. With Windows becoming the PC standard of the early 1990's however, Microsoft decided that native digital media playback had to be part of the OS. And that's where our story begins.

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#1 By 2459 (24.233.39.98) at 10/5/2002 8:49:53 PM
I've been responding to the new portion of this article (Addressing the Lies: Windows Media 9 Series vs. Apple Computer) on http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=154018#post154018

Basically trying to explain what WMA Lossless does.

#2 By 37 (216.43.88.209) at 10/5/2002 9:31:01 PM
Wow, that is quite a long article...Needless to day, it's very in depth.

I guess we will have to wait for more reviews once the final version is released. My experience with it has been really good so far. But, I don't really use many of those services. I mostly use the radio play back, cd playing, CD recording and that is pretty much it.

This post was edited by Brian_MS_MVP on Sunday, October 06, 2002 at 12:43.

#3 By 2459 (24.233.39.98) at 10/5/2002 10:48:04 PM
Realist:
MP3 cannot compare to WMA's better quality/filesize performance. And, from a comparison of compression performance between WMA Lossless and Monkey's, WMA Lossless achieves higher levels of compression (A bit over half the original for Monkey's vs half to a third the original for WMA Lossless).

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/comparison.html
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/nextwave/quality.asp

#4 By 6253 (12.237.219.240) at 10/5/2002 10:56:43 PM
#5, it's because the WMV format is being locked at version 9. That means there will never be a WMV 10. The WMA format was locked at version 8. That means the WMA format is totally unchanged in WMP 9 and can never be changed.

If Microsoft comes up with improvements, they have to make it an entirely new format rather than a new version of WMA or WMV.

The WMP 9 beta has a known bug where it won't play WMA files which have a WMV file extension. This bug breaks Microsoft Producer, and will be fixed in the final release, but the reason for the bug's existence is the forking of WMA/WMV code to allow WMA to remain locked at version 8 while WMV was worked on.

#5 By 6253 (12.237.219.240) at 10/5/2002 11:09:50 PM
n4cer, where are you getting your numbers on the WMA Lossless compression vs. Monkey's? I'll admit I haven't tested the encode myself, and I'm sure I'll prefer WMA over the obscurity of Monkey's, but looking at numbers like these doesn't suggest that WMA technically beats Monkey's:

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general&action=display&num=1032509189

#6 By 2459 (24.233.39.98) at 10/5/2002 11:27:45 PM
My numbers came from the two links.

One is to MSWM site which states that lossless gives you half to a third the size of the original content.
The other link shows a comparison chart on Monkey's Audio site that shows Monkey's Audio compressing a CD to 52.7% of its original size(at best).
I see now, however, that the chart uses version 3.90b1 whereas the latest version of Monkey's is 3.97. So there could have been significant improvements in the compression between those versions.

#7 By 2459 (24.233.39.98) at 10/5/2002 11:46:46 PM
I think they locked down both formats at version 9, not 8. There are WMA players that required firmware updates to work with 9.

There is a setting in WM Encoder to make content that is compatible with WM7, however. I don't know what the tradeoffs are, though.

#8 By 143 (198.211.47.114) at 10/6/2002 1:08:51 AM
I swear I seen that Monkey.gif on a porn site over a year ago.

#9 By 7746 (213.93.165.242) at 10/6/2002 3:12:21 AM
#8

They always can add a realease x.x.
Like Dolphi 5.1 is the latest available for consumners or not?


#10 By 7557 (62.253.128.4) at 10/6/2002 5:24:38 AM
The article is a thinly disguised Microsoft advert.

As to any kind of comparitive analysis - it appears to be talking about MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 both as MPEG 4 without distinguishing the two. And as I understand it, much of MS technology is very similar to MPEG 4 (it was only parameters that differed in earlier codecs).

For those wondering about backwards compatibility - it is possible. Essentially, all of the modern codecs use the same principles, they only differ in the parameters used in the maths. So as part of the stream, you include those parameters. But the most important point, is the encoding - this is where the differences really lie - not the decoding. That isn't included in your portable player or DVD player.

#11 By 665 (64.126.91.172) at 10/6/2002 10:41:13 AM
#16, "10/4 UPDATE: The complete review is now available!" It isn't that old:)

This post was edited by ToddAW on Sunday, October 06, 2002 at 10:41.

#12 By 135 (208.50.201.48) at 10/6/2002 12:44:36 PM
mhfm - They improve the algorithm by which they encode. The whole way these compressed audio formats work is by selectively picking out bits of music and throwing it away because "you can't hear it anyway." So if they can do a better job at picking out that music, then they can compress better. It's for this similar reason that some MP3 encoders work better than others.

Playback is the same regardless, the work is in the encoding...

JaggedFlame - I think I'm going lossless... It might be time to build a multimedia PC for my living room. Slap a 120 Gig drive into it, and build a CD jukebox.

A couple things Paul doesn't note about, these were in WMP8 in XP. SRS audio enhancement and HDCD playback. I assume these will still only be available in the XP version.

#13 By 665 (64.126.91.172) at 10/6/2002 3:15:05 PM
The article was put up in segments. It was completed last Friday, so we posted it yesterday. We knew it was up partially before then.

#14 By 6253 (12.237.219.240) at 10/6/2002 5:57:19 PM
mhfm and n4cer, the WMA format was locked at v8, but codecs never get locked. Anybody can write a codec or update their own codec versions, so Microsoft does not have the ability to force third parties to lock their codecs.

There are cases where you can improve the implementation of an encoder without changing the codec's algorithms, so you can encode faster and/or smaller without affecting the ability of an existing decoder implementation to decode the content. That's one thing that WMA 9 does, which is how some WMA 9 content is backward compatible with WMP 8.

But a second thing that WMA 9 does is ship additional codecs, the lossless codec and the digital surround codec. The addition of these codecs has nothing to do with the WMA format itself. This is the same deal as with WAV and AVI. Those formats have not changed in many years, but I could write a codec tomorrow, and if I encode some content in that codec, your WAV/AVI player would need my codec in order to decode the content. That's the only reason that some WMP 8 devices would need a firmware update; it's not to update the WMA format, just to add codecs which are bundled with WMP 9.

n4cer, I don't think the biggest benchmark discrepancy comes from Monkey's going from 3.90b1 to 3.97. I think Microsoft's vague claim of "one-half to one-third" is misleading. Microsoft is pulling the same trick as hard drive manufacturers who conveniently redefined 1GB as 1 billion bytes just because the average end-user wouldn't realize that 1GB is technically more than 70MB larger than 1 billion bytes. (On a 100GB hard drive, you "lose" about 6.87GB.)

If I translate "one-half to one-third" on a technical/mathematical basis, that means 50.0000% to 33.3333%. I think Microsoft is relying on a layperson looking at a glass of water which is 57% full and saying, "Oh, that looks one-half full." I think Microsoft might also have a "reference" song which actually compresses down into the mid 30% range, but I highly doubt that real-world songs will frequently do better than about 55%.



#15 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 10/6/2002 7:11:38 PM
holedup - Microsoft is probably using this song for their reference piece:

http://www.azstarnet.com/~solo/4min33se.htm


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