Edge as default media player

Copper Contributor

It would be nice if Edge could replace Movies & TV and Groove Music. I've done some quick testing and it already works for webm and mp4, if added support for mkv, avi, and wmv, 3rd party media players would become obsolete.

5 Replies

@Muriel_Mondadori 

That is an interesting suggestion.  I'm not sure if Edge would be made to replace the built-in Windows Media players. I will relay your suggestion to the product team.

 

Gabriel

@v-gapart Please don't bloat the browser with that!

 

If someone really want this I guess it could be achieved by using an extension.

Examples:

 

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/media-player/mgmhnaapafpejpkhdhijgkljhpcpecpj?hl=en

 

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/local-media-player/dfjejaldnpbdkacoehinpjplnmfahhop?hl=en

 

If there are something blocking extensions from doing it better then please improve the extensions mechanism to unblock it.

@cbomtempo Both extensions that you suggested have less than 1 Mb in size, so I don't think it can be considered bloat. Even more when it could be a selling point for Edge. A built-in media player with extra functions like AI generated subtitles for when you're listening to podcasts or watching a video in another language + automatic translation for your language using Bing would be a big selling point, and it would also give lots of data to improve MS AI.

 

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, will start using them.

Browser plays HLS streams via default HTML5 video element. It doesn't support various media containers, and has limited codecs support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video

 

Its a bad idea to make a browser do everything for everyone. It should open web pages fast and support extensions .

Hi @Muriel_Mondadori !

 

When I said bloat I was not referring to the installation size, but to the functionalities.

 

A browser should be used to browser web pages, period. If you want mare from it you could achieve it by using extensions.

 

I don't want to be rude, but the browser engine could be used to build "virtually" any application and I don't want my browser to be a media player, a calculator, a text editor, a file explorer, or anything else other than a web browser... Even because someone could implement all those functionalities as a web application or a browser extension.