Summary: the Windows Media Player is a basic video and music player with support for playing all common audio and video formats, and is preconfigured to integrate well with the default music and video folders of Windows. However, it lacks many kinds of advanced functionality and provides practically no customization whatsoever.
![A window titled "Media Player" display a video of two cats, a semi-transparent interface overlaiding it. On the top-left corner, there is a home button. At the bottom, a progress bar, on its left the timestamp 0:00:01, on its right 0:00:12. Below, a text reads "[virtualcuriosities.com] Video by Magda Ehlers." Seven clickable icons appear on the middle below the progress bar: crossed arrows (shuffle), a left arrow with a vertical line (go to start), a curved left arrow with a 10 underneath, a pause icon, a curved forward arrow with a 30 underneath, a right arrow with a vertical line, and two looping arrows with crossed diagonally. On the right side, another 5 icons can be seen, including a volume icon and a three dots button.](https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/windows-media-player-20250409-1024x577.webp)
Supported Formats
I've tried opening a few different files on the Windows Media Player to check if it supports them.
| Format | Support |
|---|---|
| WAV | ✅ Yes. |
| MP3 | ✅ Yes. |
| FLAC | ✅ Yes. |
| OGG | ✅ Yes. |
| WMA | ✅ Yes. |
| AIFF | ❌ No*. |
| MIDI | ❌ No*. |
⚠️ I tried opening AIFF files from two difference sources but neither opened with the Media Player. Strangely, only one of them opened with MPC-BE. I'm not very familiar with this format so I'm not sure what could have been the reason.
⚠️ The MIDI format is supported in Windows Media Player Legacy, which ships with Windows 11, but not in the newer Media Player. Strangely, Windows Media Player version 12 (presumably the Windows 12 version) does claim to support MIDI1, so I guess MIDI support will be back later?
| Format | Support |
|---|---|
| AVI | ✅ Yes. |
| MP4 | ✅ Yes. |
| WebM | ✅ Yes. |
| MKV | ✅ Yes. |
| WMV | ✅ Yes. |
| MOV | ✅ Yes. |
| FLV | ❌ No. |
Observation: I got a couple of missing codec errors when trying to play MKV videos I recorded in OBS Studio. It seems some common codec is simply missing for some reason.
[...] If you have a video that encoded with HEVC, or H.265, you have to buy a $1 add-on in the Microsoft Store to watch that video in Media Player. It’s not the cost of the add-on — I think most of us could spare $1 — but it’s a slap in the face to charge for such a widely-used codec in the first place. You’ll commonly find HEVC in video editing and capture applications, so you could easily record or edit a video and not be able to watch it in Media Player.
What’s more frustrating is that Microsoft offered HEVC support for free previously. [...]
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/windows-media-player-op-ed/ (accessed 2025-04-09)
Playlist
❌ No sibling traversal: although there are "play next" and "play previous" buttons, opening a file on the Media Player will not automatically load other files in the same folder in a playlist nor will it try to discover the next file when you click the next button. You'll have to manually add them to a playlist first.
✅ Can loop a whole playlist.
✅ Can loop a single file.
❌ Can't loop a segment of a file.
✅ Can shuffle.
⚠️ Media Player calls the play list "play queue," likely because it has the ability to create playlists and manage. Not a big problem, but I did have trouble finding it when I was searching for "play list" on the interface for the first time.
Playback
✅ Has a progress bar.
⚠️ Displays the time elapsed and time remaining on both sides of the progress bar instead of displaying the length of the track, which makes both sides update each second. ❌ It doesn't seem to be possible to customize this.
⚠️ Can seek, however, not by pressing left and right arrow keys. Instead, through the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Left (skip backwards 10 seconds) and Ctrl+Right (skip forward 30 seconds). ⚠️ The amount of time skipped is asymmetrical. ❌ It doesn't seem possible to customize this.
✅ Can cast to smart TV.
✅ Can go full screen.
✅ Double clicking the main pane enter and exists full screen mode.
✅ Pressing the Esc key leaves full screen mode.
✅ Has a "mini player" mode that hides some of the interface. I'm not sure why would anyone use this when you can just resize the window, however. Maybe it's because on Windows 11 the window borders are so thin they're too difficult to resize?
✅ Can play at different speeds. ⚠️ Only values are 0.25x, 0.5, 1x, 1.5x, and 2x.
❌ Can't go to the next frame of the video. Clicking on the progress bar lets you seek forward and backward slowly, but not frame by frame.
❌ Can't save the current frame of the video as an image.
Audio
✅ Has a volume control.
⚠️ Clicking on the speakers icon display a horizontal panel for changing the volume. ✅ Clicking on the speakers on this panel quickly mutes and unmutes the audio, ⚠️ however because the panel is horizontal the button to mute is unnecessarily far from the button that displays this drop down. Windows 7 had did it right for its taskbar. I don't know why they changed it.
✅ Has an equalizer.
❌ Doesn't have visualizations. ⚠️ Legacy still does. What a downgrade.
✅ Can display the cover picture of a music album.
✅ Can switch between languages in videos with multiple audio streams. This is hidden in the first button in the bottom-right button group that has an icon that looks like just a rectangle.
Subtitle Support
✅ Can display embedded subtitles. This is hidden in the first button in the bottom-right button group that has an icon that looks like just a rectangle.
✅ Can load subtitles from a file (e.g. .srt). Also hidden in that same button.
File Properties
⚠️ The Media Player has a properties dialog that displays properties of the currently played file, accessible via the Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut, however, the properties displayed are limited to: title, artists, album, track, length, genre, year, bit rate, and item type (e.g. .mp3).
Other Observations
❌ No customizability whatsoever: its settings page contains 6 settings: 2 folder locations, 2 for theming, 1 for automatically looking up information online, and 1 to remember recently played media. Consequently, any disliked behavior isn't customizable.
✅ Media Library Manager: Windows Media Player can list video files and music files contained in video and audio folders you can configure in its settings. Videos are displayed as thumbnails, and music can be listed by songs, albums, and artists. In particular, the album display will also display the cover image of the album if there is one. While this is kind of nice, I can't help but feel these are functions the file manager, File Explorer, should have instead, otherwise you have the media player doing a file manager's job.
❌ Broken scrollbar: in Home, Music Library, Video Library, etc., when there is a scrollbar displayed in the main pane, the scrollbar doesn't actually touch the right edge of the screen so you can't drag it with the mouse if you move your cursor all the way to the right. This is clearly a bug in the GUI.
❌ Modal interface: instead of having multiple windows for multiple different interfaces as one would expect, Windows Media Player makes the title of the file currently being played a large button that you have to click to switch between two view modes: one that displays the video if the video is playing (when it's audio it just displays a blurry cover image since there are no visualizations), and one that displays the play queue if it's selected (otherwise it will display, Home, Music Library, or Video Library depending on which is currently selected). If this wasn't confusing enough, this large button you have to click to see the rest of the interface doesn't even look like a button. It's just the title of the file. Even the tooltip reads "exit now playing" instead of "view play queue" or something similar. At least you have several other ways to access these, such as through the context menu.
❌ No menubar: Which means File -> Open to display an open file dialog is a button that you can find on the Home page after you "exit now playing." Help -> About is hidden in Settings. And several functions that would be in the menubar are hidden in an unlabeled three dots button at the bottom right corner.
Other Perspectives
- https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/windows-11s-new-media-player-brings-big-improvements-to-audio-and-video (accessed 2025-04-09)