Microsoft multimedia issues have started when the market wanted to start listening to music and watch movies on computers. The need to make the internet more interesting using sound, picture and videos have begun, when we got bored with those static pages of information.

People started to need more out of their computers, they were playing games on their PC’s listening to the game sounds and connecting better sound speakers to their computers and using their computers as media centers, to listen to music, watch movies, etc…

 

Microsoft has thought of all of that when they started and their new operating systems included some basic tools, for listening to music and sounds, and watch movies. At first, the quality was quite poor, but as computer’s equipment progressed, as sound cards have become more advanced and sound speakers had better quality, and included subwoofers, the demand for a more advanced and better quality software multimedia solutions have increased.

Microsoft rose to the challenge,
and developed their “Media Player” software, which in time got updated and better for playing any of the multimedia types of files. Microsoft learned to use the new “Codec” techniques that have been developed and included all of the suitable plug-ins to increase the support that the media player needed to be able to produce the most effective and the best quality they could deliver to give us the quality we needed.

Since Microsoft has ruled most of the end user’s computers as the leading operating system, the media player was part of their system and was the default player for those type of needs. There is some competition out there to the Microsoft’s player, some of them even I prefer better, than the media player, like the “KMP player” for movie watching, or the XBMC multimedia center for listening to music, but I have to say that Microsoft was a pioneer in that area, and for that, they have my respect.