Windows Media Player 11 build 4826 Leaked

Windows Media Player 11 build 4826 Leaked

Only days after revealing that WMP11 XP would in fact be released for public preview on May 17th, it has very recently leaked onto the net. This new build does appear to have all the publicly mentioned features. Along with that, stability has been greatly improved since Windows Media Player 10, and appears to consume less resources.

Features in WMP 11 for XP (June 06):

* New UI

* Support for better synchronization for portable devices

* Album “stacks” of album art

* Indexed libraries with search-as-you-type features

* User controlled downgrade of quality for DRM content to allow for smaller files

* DRM content will contain metadata that shows what the user is allowed to do with the file

* Includes Microsoft and MTV’s Urge music store

Features in WMP 11 for Vista (Early 07):

* Everything that is in the WMP 11 for XP

* Playing content (including DRM) on your PC from another PC or device

* Viewing content from the Vista Media library on other PCs or digital devices, such as Tivo

* Playback of High Value video content

* Shell integration with Windows Media Player

* Content Indexer change notification to sync My Music and WMP library

* DVD Fullscreen playback enhancements

* DRM Transcode

* High quality video streaming over home networks

* Media foundation for playback

The build string is 11.0.5358.4826 for those that may be curious. Also, I should mention in case you didn’t read the stuff above, it will be publicly available on May 17th so if you wait just a little bit longer you can get the official beta preview direct from Microsoft.

From my opportunity to play with this it is quite nice. It’s much quicker than WMP10, it’s a lot more visually attractive as well as being significantly more intuitive to navigate. My old gripe is that it definitely is noticeably slow when you have a fairly large library of music (lets just say it’s fairly large um k?).

How to install this leaked build:

• Step 1. Find it yourself
• Step 2. Extract to a new folder
• Step 3. Double click wmfdist11.exe to install Media Player 11 codec
• Step 4. It will ask you to reboot, but you don’t have to
• Step 5. Double click wmp11.exe to install Media Player 11
• Step 6. Again, you don’t actually have to reboot
• Step 7. Enjoy, you now have WMP 11 without any validation

…oh, and here’s proof of it running on Windows XP SP2.