Pump Up the Bandwidth

Lenny Bailes

Warning: Microsoft issues stern warnings predicting doom and gloom if you install the prerelease version of Windows Media Player 7 software. We didn't experience any problems in our testing, but if you have valuable data on your hard drive, you should back it up as a precaution before you install Windows Media Player.

Microsoft claims that the release version of its Windows Media Player 7 will provide unbeatable playback quality for audio and video multimedia files, but the prerelease version we tested doesn't contain optimized code. Here are a few things you can do to improve Windows Media Player 7 beta's playback performance.

• If you experience poor performance with Internet Radio Stations or Broadband broadcasts, choose Tools, Options, click the Performance tab, and double-check the options under Connection Speed, Network Buffering, and Video Hardware acceleration. You may achieve better results by clicking the "My connection speed is" button and manually specifying your Internet connection speed rather than depending on the automatic "Detect my connection speed" option.
• On underpowered computers (with P-166 to P-233 processors), you may experience clipping and/or skipping when playing CDs or audio-only files on your local hard disk with the Now Playing tab selected. You can improve playback performance by avoiding the Now Playing tab and listening to your music with the Media Library or CD Audio tab selected. This frees up CPU time by not displaying the (sometimes impressive) Visualizations available on the Now Playing tab.
• You may find that sound and video don't properly synchronize when you play AVI, QuickTime, or MPEG format video on Windows Media Player--even on high-speed PII and PIII machines. You may have better luck by playing these files with the original, compact Media Player included with Windows 98: Click Start, Run, type MPLAYER and click OK to open this program. Choose File, Open and load the file you want to play. The new multimedia CODECs installed by Windows Media Player allow this smaller, less CPU-intensive program to play AVI, QuickTime, and MPEG files with better fidelity.