Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

I kinda have to hand it to Microsoft for dogfooding vibecoding with Copilot to such an extent. You can't say they encourage their customers to use a bad solution while doing something different in-house.

Removing HEVC support wasn't their choice but probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices [1].

Windows media player probably sees very little usage nowadays and probably even less for HEVC, when most content playback happens via streaming and browsers today.

As for the RAM increase, well that's probably a consequence of the general trend of doing frontend engineering via JS/TS instead of using OS native frontend APIs. The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily, and probably LLMs know way better how to deal with a react app than an UML one.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/lawsuits-licensing-a...

I don't think I've ever voluntarily used their shitty media player since the classic version. MPC-BE (some folks use MPC-HC) is my goto with VLC as a backup if certain codecs don't play nice with it. I'm able to use nVidia super resolution with them as well.

Do people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?

Is vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?

HEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc.

Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.

What? I can find at least one article from 2018 about HEVC being pay-walled? [0]

EDIT: Also, what do they mean by "new" Media Player? It shipped in 2022 [1]. This article is garbage. The source article [2] is fine.

[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-v...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022)

[2]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-w...

HEVC used to be a capped license per organization, so not providing it in the OS seems really harmful and expensive. Has the cap changed recently?

A solution for AC-3 is to get Dolby Digital Plus decoder for PC OEMs from here:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_inst...

and then you recieve the latest update from windows store.

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M$ knows the laws will change in their favor requiring a gov ID to boot a computer. This is how they will get away with crap like this.