Is Windows Media Player 10 Spyware?

J

jimnms

Gawd
Joined
Mar 15, 2003
Messages
882
I had been putting off installing WMP 10, but I finally did it yesterday. Other than the look, I don't see much different. What I don't like is that every time I run it, my firewall tells me that wmplayer.exe is trying to connect to go.microsoft.com on port 80. I got tired of clicking no everytime so I set it to permanantly block it, but now I have to unblock it if it needs to download a codec or stream something.

What is it trying to do, and is there a way to stop it?
 
Could just be getting the latest hip-hop crap for the "now playing" part. You know the one with all the hit music, videos, blah blah blah.
 
Go in settings and tell WMP not to connect to the internet and bring up back media info like artist ratings and people who like this also purchased this crap. You can totally disable WMP I beleive except for searching for updates which I think is automatic and you may or may not be able to disable that.

I think WMP is safe for now. Just don't download quicktime. ;)
 
carloswill said:
Go in settings and tell WMP not to connect to the internet and bring up back media info like artist ratings and people who like this also purchased this crap. You can totally disable WMP I beleive except for searching for updates which I think is automatic and you may or may not be able to disable that.

I think WMP is safe for now. Just don't download quicktime. ;)
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Yeah, but I'd take Quicktime over Real Player anyday. :p
 
carloswill said:
Go in settings and tell WMP not to connect to the internet and bring up back media info like artist ratings and people who like this also purchased this crap. You can totally disable WMP I beleive except for searching for updates which I think is automatic and you may or may not be able to disable that.
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I do have the option unchecked to connect to the internet. Here's what my options look like, I've checked all the options that look like it would make it try to connect.

i7dwmp1.png
k8hwmp2.png

t1twmp3.png
c1xwmp4.png


carloswill said:
I think WMP is safe for now. Just don't download quicktime. ;)
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I already use the quicktime and realplayer alternatives. Now we need a WMP alternative.
 
carloswill said:
Woah, who the hell downloads realplayer :eek:
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Definitely not me, I'm trying to get it off our network. Unfortunately for some reason people that make content for students use the realplayer format. DIE!
 
OldPueblo said:
Definitely not me, I'm trying to get it off our network. Unfortunately for some reason people that make content for students use the realplayer format. DIE!
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unfortunately some MP3 devices use real player exclisively to transfer content to their devices, and if you ask me i'd rather use real player for streaming content than windows media player. not to mention that i do think all the background processes real player runs reall sucks, which is why i have devised a method to strip out realsched and the stupid message center without breaking realplayer. maybe eventually i'll script together a file to automate it and then share it out to the world, but doing it by hand involves scouring through your registry and knowing what keys and values to delete.
 
Anyone use Media Player Classic or Real Alternative? I know that RA does not fully support streaming real video yet, but they're werkin on it... And as for MPC, thats one hell of a great lil player. Plays MP3 VCD SVCD DVD MPG M2V M2P AVI etc etc

Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install the official RealPlayer. You do need a media player that is capable of playing RealMedia files. The included Media Player Classic supports it. Supported are RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealVideo (.rm .ram .rmvb), RealText (.rt), and ReadPix (.rp). Not fully supported are: Streaming smil files (.smi .smil) and Realmedia embedded in webpages.
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What are you afraid of it sending? It's not Spyware. WMV or WMA is just a codec, any player that supports DShow and related should be able to play those files. (I know winamp can, if you hate WMP that much)
 
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