Chris Lanier wrote an interesting piece entitled, “Why can't the WMP team be more like the MCE team?” While I'm flattered to be in the company of my fellow bloggers, I should note that until very recently, I was the Group Product Manager for WM Player, as well as Media Center and have been blogging on WM Player for a while now :). A great example of how the blogosphere has helped the Player team was the request I put out last February asking for others to donate their large media libraries for perf testing. Sure I received the obligatory, “Oh no! What's Microsoft going to do with that data!” responses but in actuality it was a great turnout that helped the team improve perf pretty dramatically over 9 Series. (which can always be better).
I agree, it would be great to see more people blog on the Player team but truth is, blogging is a bit like speaking on-stage. Not everyone is comfortable doing it and the value vs. risk isn't always seen immediately. It's a calculated risk. So some prefer to talk to me, let me know about what's going on and we decide how best to approach.
Zach and I put out the first blogging plug-in for any Media Player, for WM Player 9 Series and that's what got me hooked. In fact, Zach is the reason I started blogging, way back almost 3 years ago now.
Here are some other Media Player blogging highlights over the past year for me:
- Blogged the Windows XP Video Decoder (MPEG-2) checkup utility co-developed by the Player team
- Blogged how to add new codecs to WM Player and MCE, including how other codec developers can get their codecs auto-recognized by WM Player and listed in the WMPlugins directory
- Fought for, and announced the RSS feeds for WMPlugins.
- Shared Thomas Hawk's comments on the Player
- Blogged WM Player 10 Tech Beta
- Blogged on WM Player 10 Error Codes
You can see more by going to my WM Player category. And I agree with Thomas, I believe he meant newsgroups are less than optimal place to discuss WM Player. It's difficult for me personally get a high quality feedback or interaction despite multiple attempts . I still do it from time to time- mostly reading and making announcements. But to hold an ongoing discussion or carry a voice and establish a report with others, blogging has been much more beneficial. For others on the team, the message boards at WMPlugins.com are a better choice. But the team does read, forward, and discuss regularly.
While I can't answer Thomas' question about future versions of WM Player (heck, we just launched WM Player 10!), I am interested to hear your thoughts on prioritized lists of features/fixes you'd like to see in future versions. You can always send to me here in comments or in email. Also the more detail you can provide about how you use the Player (how much music, predominately for msuic, video, streamed etc), the better as this helps the dev team to better understand who you are as a customer and how best to incorporate your feedback.
So, I'm not just an MCE guy, I'm still a part of the Media Player family as well. In fact, more to come on my new job- not quite ready to talk about it yet, but perhaps after CES ;).