Windows Media Components for QuickTime

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WMV Player

The WMV Preference Pane.
Developer:	Flip4Mac
OS:	Mac OS X
Use:	Multimedia framework plug-in
Website:	Link

Windows Media Components for QuickTime, also known as Flip4Mac WMV Player by Telestream, Inc. is one of the few commercial products that allow playback of Microsoft's proprietary audio and video codecs inside QuickTime for Mac OS X.

It allows playback of:

Windows Media Video 7, 8, 9 SD and HD
Windows Media Audio 7, 8, 9 Professional and Lossless

It also includes a web browser plug-in to allow playback of embedded Windows Media files in web pages.

With the components installed, any QuickTime-compatible application is able to directly play WMV content. This includes the official QuickTime Player by Apple as well as countless third party players, like NicePlayer. WMV Player also allows Windows media files to be associated to QuickTime Player.

On 2006-01-12, Microsoft discontinued Windows Media Player for Mac OS X and began distributing a free version of WMV Player as Windows Media Components for QuickTime on their website[1].

[edit] Timeline

As of July 8, 2006, Flip4Mac did not officially run on Intel-based Macs.
As of July 15, 2006, version 2.1 of Flip4Mac now supported Windows Media Player 10 content, which was previously inaccessible to Macintosh users. This newer version also supports Intel-based Macs.
As of July 27, 2006, version 2.1 is a non-beta release of the Universal Binary format for OS X.