I am quite pleased with WMP's pure playback capability, reportedly as good as anything out there now. There are a few things missing I consider essential though:
1) hotkey remapping
ctrl+p is probably not the most intuitive key to press for pausing and resuming video. Same goes for other basic stuff like skipping forward and backward, increasing and decreasing volume and etc. The only thing I found that worked somewhat ok was this:
http://wmpkeys.sourceforge.net/
This is basically a plugin that runs in the background to let's you assign global hotkeys. I see how it would be great for those who wanted to use WMP for music while minimized. As for myself, I wanted something that would allow me to control video only when the window is highlighted. It is possible to achieve similar result with this plugin except for pause/resume with space (which is not electable for anything, supposedly since that would interfere with accessibility tools), with a major drawback of those keys used for global hotkeys being rendered useless in other apps with WMP minimized. Pausing video and minimizing it when something needs attention in the middle of it happens too far often to me for this plugin to be useful. Pause/resume with space bar actually works with WMP 12, only when the the button is highlighted, however (which happenes close to never).
2) quick screencaps
Some of us like to take plenty of screencaps, I regularly take about a couple dozen for my 20-minute-or-so-long clips. You could imagine how tedious it would be to resort to copy and pasting into MSPaint or its likes. Fortuanately, most reputable third party players like kmp or GOM have this feature built-in, even allowing you to take up to 100 consecutive frames if needed. Though that comes handy at times, I could live with mere a barebones screencapping ability with a hotkey not requiring more than 2 keys. Strangely, WMP10 had this (ctrl+i) which was mysteriously removed after WMP11 came out of beta state.
3) better subtitles
WMP's built-in subtitle display is a bit picky but works reasonably well as long as the subtitle text files (.smi) are error-free. Sad part the only way you can adjust the formatting is to modify the individual subtitle text files (yes, each and every one of them) themselves AFAIK, which can be very tedious. I heard this can also break the alingment and wordwrap on subtitles at times. Using VSFilter or DirectVobSub gives you better subtitles (still inferior to KMP or gom, I reckon), though that would mean no DXVA, one of the inherent advantages of WMP12.
In the end, I think I could probably try to get by without 1) and 3), but 2) is very much missed. Is there a simple enough fix to address that, in the way of a small helper or plugin? Official MS site for plugins didn't have more than a handful of plugins, none of them relevant to what I am asking. For your record, I would urge you not to recommend another player like VLC I was never fond of: I already have KMP to use if anything, I just wanted to see if WMP12 can meet my most essential needs. Speaking of which, I should probably move to DAUM Pop Player, kmp is starting to sound more and more like the next winamp and its takeover by AOL
1) hotkey remapping
ctrl+p is probably not the most intuitive key to press for pausing and resuming video. Same goes for other basic stuff like skipping forward and backward, increasing and decreasing volume and etc. The only thing I found that worked somewhat ok was this:
http://wmpkeys.sourceforge.net/
This is basically a plugin that runs in the background to let's you assign global hotkeys. I see how it would be great for those who wanted to use WMP for music while minimized. As for myself, I wanted something that would allow me to control video only when the window is highlighted. It is possible to achieve similar result with this plugin except for pause/resume with space (which is not electable for anything, supposedly since that would interfere with accessibility tools), with a major drawback of those keys used for global hotkeys being rendered useless in other apps with WMP minimized. Pausing video and minimizing it when something needs attention in the middle of it happens too far often to me for this plugin to be useful. Pause/resume with space bar actually works with WMP 12, only when the the button is highlighted, however (which happenes close to never).
2) quick screencaps
Some of us like to take plenty of screencaps, I regularly take about a couple dozen for my 20-minute-or-so-long clips. You could imagine how tedious it would be to resort to copy and pasting into MSPaint or its likes. Fortuanately, most reputable third party players like kmp or GOM have this feature built-in, even allowing you to take up to 100 consecutive frames if needed. Though that comes handy at times, I could live with mere a barebones screencapping ability with a hotkey not requiring more than 2 keys. Strangely, WMP10 had this (ctrl+i) which was mysteriously removed after WMP11 came out of beta state.
3) better subtitles
WMP's built-in subtitle display is a bit picky but works reasonably well as long as the subtitle text files (.smi) are error-free. Sad part the only way you can adjust the formatting is to modify the individual subtitle text files (yes, each and every one of them) themselves AFAIK, which can be very tedious. I heard this can also break the alingment and wordwrap on subtitles at times. Using VSFilter or DirectVobSub gives you better subtitles (still inferior to KMP or gom, I reckon), though that would mean no DXVA, one of the inherent advantages of WMP12.
In the end, I think I could probably try to get by without 1) and 3), but 2) is very much missed. Is there a simple enough fix to address that, in the way of a small helper or plugin? Official MS site for plugins didn't have more than a handful of plugins, none of them relevant to what I am asking. For your record, I would urge you not to recommend another player like VLC I was never fond of: I already have KMP to use if anything, I just wanted to see if WMP12 can meet my most essential needs. Speaking of which, I should probably move to DAUM Pop Player, kmp is starting to sound more and more like the next winamp and its takeover by AOL
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