Introducing Windows Media Player and Windows Media plyer Feautures

Windows Media Player is a media player developed by Microsoft that is bundled with all computers that run Windows.
Windows Media Player is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. Editions of Windows Media Player were also released for Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris but development of these has since been discontinued.

In addition to being a media player, Windows Media Player includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to compact discs, build Audio CDs in recordable discs and synchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enables users to purchase or rent music from a number of online music stores.
Windows Media Player replaced an earlier piece of software called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback.
The current version, Windows Media Player 11, was released on October 30, 2006. Its successor, Windows Media Player 12, is under development; an initial test version was demonstrated in October 2008 as part of Windows 7.
The default file formats are Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Systems Format (ASF), and supports its own XML based playlist format called Windows Playlist (WPL). The player is also able to utilize a digital rights management service in the form of Windows Media DRM.
Windows Media Player Features:
* Allows the user to connect, share and sync data with portable handheld devices and game consoles. Media can be optionally transcoded to a format better suited for the target device, automatically, when synchronizing.
* Playback of audio, video and pictures, along with fast forward, reverse, seek and time compression and dilation.
* Supports local playback, streaming playback and progressive downloads.
* Support for any media codec and container format using specific DirectShow filters.
* Full media management, via the integrated media library, which offers cataloguing and searching of media. Media can be arranged according to album, artist, genre, date et al..
* Video Smoothing which upscales frame-rate by interpolating added frames, in effect giving a smoother playback on low-framerate videos.
* Includes a 10-band graphic equalizer and SRS WOW audio post-processing system. Windows Media Player can also have attached plug-ins which process the output audio or video data.
* Features a taskbar-mounted Mini mode in which the most common media control buttons are presented as a toolbar on the Windows taskbar. Flyout windows can display media information, the active visualization or the video being played back.
* Can use video overlays or VMR surfaces, if the video card supports them. In Windows XP, it uses VMR7 by default, but can also be made to use the more advanced YUV mixing mode by enabling the "Use high quality mode" option in Advanced Performance settings. This turns on deinterlacing, scaling and improved color accuracy. [7]
* Version 11 introduced improved support for DirectX accelerated decoding of WMV video (DXVA decoding)
* Features integrated CD-burning support for audio as well as data CDs. Data CDs can have any of the media formats supported by the player. While burning Data CDs, the media can, optionally, be transcoded into WMA format.
* Audio CDs can be ripped as WMA or WMA 10 Pro at 48, 64, 96, 128, 160 and 192 kbit/s, WMA lossless (470 to 940 kbit/s), WMA variable bitrate (from 40-75 kbit/s up to 240-355 kbit/s), MP3 at 128, 192, 256 and 320 kbit/s, or uncompressed WAV. 24 bit high-resolution CDs are also supported, if capable audio hardware is present.
* Information on CDs such as album name, artist and track listings can optionally be automatically downloaded from the Microsoft Windows Media Database when the CD is inserted.
* Includes intrinsic support for Windows Media codecs which support multichannel audio at up to 24-bit 192 kHz resolution.
* Can play files in WMA, WAV or MP3 media formats. However, it will not play MP3 files that contain compressed ID3 headers ("tags"); trying to do so results in a "The input media file is invalid" error message.
* Supports subtitles and closed-captioning, if present in the media.
* Features "Synchronized Lyrics", by which different lines of lyrics can be time-stamped, so that they display only at those times.
* Windows Explorer shell integration to add files and playlist to the Now Playing and other playlists can be controlled from the Windows Explorer shell itself, via right-click menu.
* Provides an embeddedable ActiveX control for Internet Explorer so that developers can play Windows Media on web pages.
* A fully featured tag editor was featured in versions 8-11 of WMP, called the Advanced Tag Editor. However, the feature was not present in the latest preview version of Windows Media Player 12.
Resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player