Is WMA the fastest?
Reply #5 – 2003-11-18 04:13:06
1) A gut feeling that in the future WMA Lossless will have better hardware support than other lossless formats. I realize at the moment FLAC does have the best hardware support, but I kind of think of Microsoft as the Borg and they'll eventually just take over. In the beginning days of the Internet everyone used Netscape and now it seems Explorer has basically made Netscape irrelevant. I realize this isn't the best logic. But I haven't started encoding yet, so if you can give me a persuasive arguement to use FLAC or something else, I'm listening. I think it depends entirely on the decision of the EU about WMP, without WMP bundled, Microsoft hasn't a chance in the digital media market, Microsoft cannot lose the European market so the ruling will change the steer in Microsoft policies.2) Using WMA means that basically any computer with Windows XP will be able to play my files. Thus it's easier to swap files with friends when I visit them, plus I can listen to files on a notebook without having to install any additional software. I plan on getting a bithead from Headroom and use this as my "transportable audio" hardware. No, it doesn't, in order to play WMA lossless the computer needs Windows XP AND Windows Media Player 9. Windows XP comes with Windows Media Player 8 which cannot playback WMA lossless without a codec update which I think is the wmfdist.exe (Windows Media Format 9 Runtime) that is 3.89 MB. Also be very careful when encoding to WMA because if you set WMPlayer to 'Protect Content' the files won't be playable in any other PC than yours, also you won't be able to play them if you reformat.