Windows Media circus
The Digital Storytelling Festival was a blast -- more on it later this
week. But here's a sad little technical sidelight.
I wanted to view the little video snippets
that Don Wrege had posted, in which he interviewed various presenters at
the festival. (In the still on that page you can see just how little sleep
I was getting last week.) The clips didn't work using my normal browser
(Opera 7) so I tried IE. No go, either. Then I saw his note that you needed
Windows Media Player 9. OK, sooner or later I'd need to upgrade anyway. I
don't like Windows Media Player -- I prefer using MusicMatch for my music
and Quicktime for my videos -- but one needs all these players these days.
So whatever; over to Microsoft, time to download.
Weirdly, Windows Media 9 would not -- and still will not --
install on my Win2K box. First time the installer actually hard-crashed my
system -- no warning, no system shutdown routine, just black screen,
reboot. I've had better luck with Win2K than with any other Microsoft OS
I've ever used; this was really bizarre behavior, the sort of thing I'd
expect from some renegade plug-in provider, not MSFT itself.
OK, I thought, maybe it's because I need to patch my Win2K up to date
with all of those endless Windows Update downloads that I have avoided
because I remain a firm believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," and
because we have a pretty good firewall. So a half-hour later I've installed
the Service Pack 3, the Security Bundle, and more, a total of 30 megabytes
worth of patches. My operating system has now been patched within an inch
of Bill Gates' scalp; surely Windows Media will now be a happy
camper and I can install it and watch my videos.
No way! As of this writing, all attempts to install Windows Media 9 (and
yes, I downloaded the version specifically tagged for Win2K, not the one
offered for WinXP) have failed. I get a variety of error messages. (I
finally saw the videos on my laptop, which has Windows XP.)
It's funny. You think, hey, computing has come a long way, Microsoft has
cleaned up its act, things really do work better these days -- and then an
experience like this conks you on the head and reminds you how bad it still
is out there.
Microsoft, we're told, is counting on Windows Media to be its wedge into
the digital-home-entertainment future. All I can say is, my stereo doesn't
act like this, my TV doesn't act like this, and we shouldn't accept our
software working like this, either.
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