At the end of last year Microsoft previewed its new Media Player app to Windows Insiders. The new app replaces the old Groove Music app, the app that was once Zune Music, then Xbox Music became Groove Music. The app has just started rolling out to Windows Insiders on the beta channel.

The new app has the Windows 11 look and feel along with most of the features Groove Music. The app is for playing back locally stored music and video content and can also be used for managing media meta data.

You can add music and video libraries to the app and play individual files and files from a folder. It has a full screen playback mode which animates the album art and there is also a mini player.

For video playback it also supports downloading codec files from the Microsoft Store. I opened a VOB files from a ripped DVD and it downloaded the relevant codec from Microsoft.

You can also use the app for managing metadata. You can manually enter the data or have the app download the metadata from the Internet.

At the moment it doesn’t support playing from the network or media steamers, hopefully Microsoft can add the features in the future.

Here is my hands on video looking at the new media player in Windows 11:

Leave a Reply