Windows Media Player

Media Player, or Windows Media Player, is a multimedia player and library application included with Microsoft Windows. Depending on the operating system version, there are multiple editions of the application, all using the same name but including different features.

The first version of Windows to include a media player is Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions 1.0. Slightly updated versions of the player then shipped with Windows 3.1 and later revisions of the 16-bit Windows line. A larger update was introduced as a part of the Video for Windows suite, which updated the user interface and added support for copying media to documents via OLE. This version would be also ported to 32 bits and included with Windows NT 3.1 and later Windows 95. It would continue to be bundled with Windows even after the newer versions were introduced, with the last version of Windows to include it being Windows Server 2003. Except for the very first version, the original player didn't use its own versioning scheme and instead used the Windows version number.

Microsoft ceased active development of Windows Media Player after Windows 7 shipped in 2009, making Windows Media Player 12 the final version of Windows Media Player. It is still included in Windows 8 and later, but its functionality has been superseded by Microsoft Movies & TV and Groove Music.

On 16 November 2021, Microsoft began to roll-out the new redesigned Media Player app to Dev Channel, replacing the Groove Music app. The new version of Media Player would later rolled out to Beta Channel on 3 February 2022. The new Media Player was released to the public on 16 February 2022.

In Windows 11 build 22572, the application has been renamed to "Windows Media Player Legacy" in order to distinguish it from the modern Media Player application.

Windows versions

 * 1.0
 * 3.1
 * 3.15
 * 3.5
 * 3.51
 * 4.0
 * 4.1
 * 4.9
 * 5.0
 * 5.1
 * 5.2
 * 6.1
 * 6.4
 * 7.0
 * 7.1
 * 8.0
 * 9.0
 * 10.0
 * 11.0
 * 12.0