So yesterday Sarah appeared on the Scoble Show talking about the girl geek dinners and geeks versus nerds. Whilst I wasn't expecting podtech to have bothered supporting the Zune just yet I had expected them to at least support Windows. They don't; they only provide MPEG4 videos files which Windows doesn't support (well Vista Ultimate does apparently, but until Toshiba provide drivers for my laptop Vista isn't touching my machine). I attempted to install ffdshow which provides DirectShow filters to Windows Media Player but everytime I tried to play the file I got errors. Then I remember the installation dialog during the Zune software setup prompting me for the file extensions I wanted to load with it. Now I wanted to keep everything in Windows Media Player so I unchecked everything. I fired up the Zune software, pulled down the Options menu and choose Playback / More Options. There on the File Types tab was options for MPEG-4 media file (mp4) and MPEG-4 video file (m4v). I checked them and pressed Apply and lo, I have software that will play MP4 files.

That's not really the point. We know that the Zune software has WMP underneath it, it's rather obvious. Aside from the stupidity of not integrating with the WMP database we now have the stupidity of Microsoft delivering the MPEG4 codec not using their own standard, DirectShow. There's an argument that because MS needs to license the MP4 codec why would they add it for free into WMP? Except the Zune software is free for anyone to download, so there is a free, Microsoft sourced, MPEG4 decoder. So why on earth couldn't it be back ported to WMP so those of us who want to stick with WMP and its support for plug-ins can continue to use the software we prefer?