Ah Scoble, when are you going to learn?  Everytime you mention Mac and anything Microsoft related in the same sentance, a whole bunch of Mac users are going to flame you something savage.  In this case of course their completely right – Windows Media Player for Mac sucks and I don’t bother watching any Channel 9 videos because it sucks so much.  I could probably use VLC which I use for anything else that Quicktime can’t play but it just seems like too much hassle just to listen to a bunch of people prattle on and on instead of just reading a quick text based blog entry.

Since Microsoft don’t appear to be inclined to create a good player application for Mac, what about just creating a QuickTime codec plugin to allow QuickTime to play Windows Media Format?  (Note: I believe this is possible at least to a pretty good extent but really have no idea)  That way Windows Media becomes a first class codec on Mac, Apple is lumped with all the work of creating a good UI (not that they’ve had that good a track record for QuickTime player UIs) and pretty much any Mac app that works with multimedia will be able to support Windows Media as long as they’ve coded to the QuickTime APIs instead of rolling their own decoders.  That should reduce the effort required for Microsoft, increase the market share of Windows Media by making it more accessible and satisfy Mac users because they’ll have an Apple sanctioned UI (as well as a huge range of other player options they could use).

Maybe there’s a bunch of stuff that can’t be done as a QuickTime plugin but getting even just the basics would be a huge win for Windows Media Format adoption on Mac and it should wind up like a kind of “first one’s free” effect with people accepting the format and then be more open to using the Microsoft player to access the advanced features.

Shame it’ll never happen…