Bing Loves What Windows Media Player Does Not

When Bing first came out I noticed Microsoft was using Ogg-Vorbis video files as part of the Bing page background.  It makes for a cool effect without requiring the dying Flash or using a rarely useful proprietary format (like Windows Media Video).  Here is a code snippet from a Bing page.

## Code Snippet
# from Bing
video id="vid" onended="VM.play();" loop="" autobuffer="" preload="auto" oncontextmenu="return false" style="height: 768px; width: 1366px; left: 0px; visibility: visible; opacity: 1; top: -103px;" src="/az/hprichv/Chlorophyte_CorbisRM_791C869_069c_EN-US.ogv"/

You can see the .ogv reference at the end of this tag/snippet.  (See here if you are unfamiliar with Ogg.)

Now you may be thinking (as I was) “hey, this is good news for open sourced formats like Ogg and FLAC!”.  But you’d be only slightly right.

Surely this exposure bodes well for Ogg video as a format.  It gets some exposure and other developers may begin to embrace it thanks to that exposure.  However, if we dig a little deeper we find that Microsoft still hates the open source audio/video formats.

I downloaded an Ogg video file to test it against Windows Media Player (on Windows 7).  First, WMP doesn’t know what the file extension .ogv is supposed to be about.  I used Open With (because I have VLC installed but if I did not Windows would have no associated application or it might try to use Opera or another browser).  This is the first reaction of WMP:

WMP Remains Ignorant of .ogv
WMP Remains Ignorant of .ogv

But, hey, maybe WMP really does have the codec and is merely ignorant of the file extension.

WMP Fails on the Codec as Well
WMP Fails on the Codec as Well

Or not.

What does WMP have?  Moxie and self-confidence.  WMP has such faith in itself it has no idea it has failed on all counts here.

Ignorance Is Bliss
Ignorance Is Bliss

Play again?!  Thanks for playing.

We shall see what plans Microsoft has to expand this currently very limited love of open audio/video formats.  It would be a pleasant change to see them embrace FLAC and Ogg natively.  Then perhaps Apple will follow suit.

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