Well I was just looking across the articles on Bink.nu when I came across a paragraph in this one:

Windows 7 will have native support for DIVX, XVID, x264 and other popular codecs. If a target device does not support a codec, Windows 7 will transcode it

Since I've been trying out the pre-beta build of Windows 7, I decided to have a poke round in WMP, and found that it did indeed have better support. In trying it out, it seems that the only one that didn't seem to work was the Quicktime movie support, and, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a mention of ogg and flac support. Nonetheless, this is still a step in the right direction.


Screenshot

Excellent news! Thanks for the heads-up. I've been waiting for an M$ OS that betters WinXP. Windows7 may eventually be a worthy successor.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

Indeed it probably will be! Pretty much everything seems to be working in it (including fb2k), though the only problem I had was with my sound card (vista drivers caused weird problems, but xp ones fixed the issue :S). Overall, apart from the new taskbar locking-up occasionally (which is acceptable for a pre-beta release), it feels a lot more responsive and useable than Vista - apparently, MS has learnt from the mistakes they made.

Don't the marketing campaign fool you, Windows 7 is no new OS but Vista bith bug-fixes and add-ons. All your software works on win7 because it works on Vista, if you had installed the win7 pre-beta in 2006 you would have had the same compatibility problems as on Vista. Not microsoft patched things up, but the software devs did in the course of the last three years.

And I think you've been listening to other sources trying to put it down.

It's faster because it's slimmed down, maybe it was originally based on Vista but what's the problem with that if it actually works this time round?

As far as I'm aware Windows 7 is feature complete so it's only bug fixing to do?

And that's precisely why I'm so happy about the way Windows7 seems to be panning out so far.

Even if it is the 517th bug-fixed version of Vista and renamed to Windows7, who cares so long as it stands a better chance of actually working properly without the end-user being expected to fix it before they can even use it and gives back a little of the performance that Vista stole in comparison to WinXP.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

I hope their MPEG-4 decoder in Windows 7 would be better than Vista's built-in DVD decoder which does very poor de-interlacing.

Anyway, regardless of how people would think of Windows 7, they will eventually give in.
Giving W7/Vista a few years, when people start upgrading or buying a new PC, all these complaints about slow performance will go away, just like it did in XP era.

And I really doubt that Microsoft would include any lossless decoders other than WMAL.
But If they updated their built-in .zip decoder to be compatible, at least, with WinZip 11, W7 would be able to decode WavPack files.

You got me wrong, I was not putting down W7 but defending Vista. I'm looking forward to W7 and all performance increases it brings.

I wanted to say that it won't work any better than Vista. You will get less compatibility problems this time around, not because Microsoft "made it better" but because they left it the way it was.

Considering, how many millions of lines the Vista kernel has (plus all the virtualization layers, device abstraction layers, encrypted function calls...) I seriously doubt real-world benchmark will be able to show any performance increase.
As with EVERY software: newer version = bigger possibilities, more features at the cost of efficiency. Think of the vista boot times vs. XP. >300s vs. 35s on my notebook (clean boot to being logged in and able to work, and this for a 2.5year old XP installation, that is being used daily, and where the OS partition is 25GB filled out of 30GB - software binaries only, no mp3/movies)

According to M$ themselves, it's going to run a whole new kernel called MinWin...
Source

If the information is correct, Windows7 won't just a patched up version of Vista.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

Way off topic, but MinWin is not the 'kernel' of Windows 7. Sorry.

Back on topic: I've read Windows 7 will support AAC but inclusion of FLAC and OGG Vorbis is nowhere mentioned, at least I didn't read about it.