Windowsmedia.com: nothing plays

as77 · 04-18-04, 02:25 PM

I just tried Windows Media Player 9 series as installed with PPC2003 on my Axim. Earlier I already noticed that this player is rather limited, it doesn't play any of the usual multimedia formats such as avi, mpg or such, only special windows media formats. OK, so I fired up my wifi and browsed to www.windowsmedia.com hoping I will be able to find some files WMP can play. After all, this is Microsoft's site, one would expect to be WMP-playable stuff there. In fact, I got to a Pocket PC-optimized web site (mobile.windowsmedia.com), with several videos shown as available.

However, when I tried to play them, WMP came up, spent a few seconds saying "Connecting... Locating... Connecting...", then suddenly a white screen showing a big red cross saying "Windows Media Player cannot play this file" appeared. The same thing happened whenever I tried to play ANYTHING from the mobile.windowsmedia.com site, starting from the Pocket PC-optimized pages. There was a special section on the page with the title "WiFi", with wifi-speed optimized downloads. That page specifically said that these videos are optimized for downloading with Pocket PCs through wifi. NONE of those videos played either.

So, is Microsoft just plain stupid? Why do they put media on their website that don't play with their own media player?

To confirm that not my WMP installation is wrong, I browsed to ppcvidz.com. Most of the videos there played in my WMP without any problems.

HighTymes · 04-18-04, 07:58 PM

PocketMVP is probably the best program out there to play videos. It plays avi, mpeg, divx, xvid and such. It is free as well.