Thomas Hawk has been fortunate enough to be invited to a dinner with Microsoft Exec Jim Allchin and a couple of very interesting bloggers and technologists. As usual he reports with info, thoughts and some excellent pictures.
Not a 100% confirmation, but maybe we will be able to upgrade our Win XP media centers with WMP 11 and get better handling of large media collections?
I also talked with Jim about Windows Media Player. Last April I complained to Jim at our meeting about how slow Media Center handled large digital media libraries. This of course has more to do with Windows Media Player than anything. As I’ve reported previously, Jim also confirmed that we should expect to see dramatic performance improvements for large digital libraries in Vista and Windows Media Player 11 (can I get a “hot donkey” please!).
I also asked Jim if Microsoft would be releasing a standalone version of Windows Media Player 11 for people with XP and he said that they would. Although it may not have all of the features as the player shipped with Vista and although Vista is the priority right now, Jim said that we could expect an XP version of the popular player down the road as well.
Head over to ThomasHawk.com and read the rest. There are some updates and links to other discussions and blog posts at the end of his article.
(Screenshot of WMP11 from WinSuperSite.com)
eirikso 
What does “…or large digital libraries in Vista and Windows Media Player 11 (can I get a “hot donkey†please!).” mean? 🙂
Hot Donkey is Thomas Hawk’s expression for “something that I really want is now official and released….”
…or something like that.
As of now, a Google Search for Hot Donkey gives Thomas Hawk as hit number one.
Here’s an example:
Hot Donkey! Premium CableCARD HDTV in Microsoft’s Media Center Coming in 2006
I won’t even start to think about how he came up with that expression for “something that I really want…”