"Windows XP is more flexible," Chad Magendanz, the Lead Program Manager for Windows XP told me. "It has an inductive user interface that anticipates what the user needs, and offers the most common tasks." And Magendanz isn't just dancing to a new tune from the Microsoft Marketing department: In music and video, the online experience, and photography and imaging, Windows XP delivers. Let's take a look.

Music and Video
Building on the success of Windows Media Player (WMP) 7, which was released in the middle of 2000, Microsoft began to explore the areas in which it could improve for the next release. But the company felt that it wasn't enough to simply tack on new features and fix problems. Instead, WMP was rearchitected to provide a platform on which third parties could build. As such, Media Player for Windows XP (MPXP) will only be bundled with Windows XP and will not be made available separately for users of other versions of Windows, a move which is sure to raise some eyebrows.

"We wanted to create a next wave to bootstrap third party solutions," said Dave Fester, the General Manager of Marketing for Microsoft's Digital Media Division. "This enhanced Media Player will appear post-Beta 2, and it will be fun and discoverable. It enables scenarios like DVD movies, home movie creation, Internet radio, digital music, and Web-based movies."

Microsoft told me it had four design goals with MPXP: It had to be easy to use; its all-in-one capabilities had to be extended even further; it had to be lockdownable and manageable for corporations; and it needed to be optimized for Windows XP from a design standpoint. This final qualification means that MPXP uses the "Windows XP" user interface, rather than a unique look and feel. The result is an unqualified success that takes the best features from WMP7 and adds customization features to make the application more appealing to a wider range of users. But MPXP isn't just a standalone application: Where it makes sense, functionality from the player is exposed in the shell, giving users the type of end-to-end experiences that the company promised.

MPXP now includes the ability to play DVD movies, with one annoying caveat: The user must independently find and install a DVD codec for copyright reasons. Microsoft engineers told me that, for example, you could install a product such as WinDVD and have this codec added to the system. Then you could use MPXP to play DVDs. And Microsoft will offer three DVD packs from various manufacturers to add this capability to XP without the need to purchase a full DVD playback application; prices have yet to be announced. DVD playback in MPXP includes a beautiful full screen mode and integration with the player's Playlist so that you can access DVD chapters directly from the UI without having to navigate to the DVD's menu. Folks, that's good stuff.

Microsoft also made huge gains with CD-R and CD-RW recording. In Windows Media Player 7, the lame CD recording functionality was provided via an Adaptec plug-in that limited burn speeds to 2X, regardless of the capabilities of the drive. In Windows XP, CD burning happens at full speed: If you've got 24X writing capabilities, MPXP will do it. And as speeds go up in the future, the burning speed in XP will go up as well.

The first thing you'll notice in MPXP, however, is the new user interface. "Users want to be able to customize look of player," Fester said. "So now you can take away the shell and remove the outer, rectangular window for a cleaner look and feel. This outer rectangle is not displayed by default, using an auto-hide function that brings the menus back when you mouse-over. On the left side is the familiar taskbar, with some improvements. It still lists common activities and has proven popular with customers. But it can now be hidden. Full skinning capabilities are still offered in compact mode, but the new look integrates with XP."

MPXP uses the new WMA8 and WMV8 audio and video codecs for improved quality, but one of the big surprises with this release is that you can specify MP3 as a recording format. This option also comes with a caveat, however: Microsoft won't be supplying an MP3 codec in Windows XP, but it will leave the interface open for third parties to add this capability instead. And indeed, at least three companies will sell MP3 Add-on Packs for Windows XP. But Microsoft says that its WMA8 format offers near-CD quality at only 48 Kbps, which makes it possible to store more music in the same amount of space, important for those personal digital audio players and PocketPC devices. And WMV8 purportedly provides near-DVD quality video at 500 Kbps. I haven't been able to test the veracity of these claims yet, but will be looking closer at the Windows Media 8 technologies in the near future.

One of the coolest things about MPXP is its behavior for "ripping" CDs, or copying music from an audio CD to your hard drive. When you copy music from an audio CD to the system, the containing folder automatically displays the album art for the CD that was ripped. And Windows XP caches this image locally so you don't need to be connected to the Internet to see it. If you group ripped audio in folders contain artist name, where sub-folders contain folders of individual CDs, the containing folder will automatically display up to four CD album cover images automatically. The effect is amazing, and absolutely beautiful: At a glance, you can tell which folder contains which music. It's this sort of functionality that makes Windows XP truly wonderful.

Speaking of Explorer views, media files now include a plethora of meta-data information. In MP3 parlance,