Microsoft Edge gets OGG, Vorbis, and Theora support via an Extension Package

[themaniac]

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Today, we’re excited to announce a new mechanism which will allow our customers to add more formats on demand and increase our agility to add new formats in the future: Media Extensions. Alongside this mechanism, we’re releasing the Web Media Extensions package to the Microsoft Store as a free Media Extension for Microsoft Edge.

It will make it easier for the user to add support for unsupported media formats, so they can focus more on other things and get the formats supported sooner.

 

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Media Extensions are Media Foundation components designed to extend the core Windows platform and enable Windows apps including Microsoft Edge to support an ever-increasing range of formats. Media Extensions, much like browser extensions, allow customers to extend their device beyond the core experience shipped as part of Windows 10. It also allows the developers of media technologies to update and enhance media components independently of the Windows 10 release schedule. This allows us to work with the community to deliver high quality, interoperable codecs to Edge customers quickly and reliably.

It will act similar to browser extensions.

 

Source

 

I'm glad that Edge is supporting more media formats and I hope this will greatly speed up the time to it takes to implement media formats.

 

For those who use Edge and want to install it https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/web-media-extensions/9n5tdp8vcmhs?rtc=1

[GoodBytes]

It's more than Edge. It is also Groove, Movie&TV app and Windows Media Player 12.

Basically, a codec add-on to Windows 10.

[Guest]

Neat, hope this results in newer standards being adopted faster by sites. On a side note, I just found out that the Xbox store has edge extensions. (I know its the same UWP app and all, but didn't expect extensions on the Xbox store)

7 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

It's more than Edge. It is also Groove, Movie&TV app and Windows Media Player 12.

Neat, does this cover some of the previous codecs that needed to be installed separately? (Usually had issues getting them to properly install, just don't remember which codecs)

Edit: Well its seems like it doesn't, though I could be wrong

Edited December 16, 2017 by Guest

[Matu20]

Edge has a lot more problems than that, I still feel handicapped when using it.

[hishnash]

Personally as a developer who does sometimes need to work on the web frontend side of things I really wish MS just did not bother with making a browser and left it to those who understand standards:

 

Chrome, Safari and firefox are all in general rather good citizens. yes, Edge is much better than IE but it is still nasty and has some very MS style edge cases.

[SupremeChunk]

10 minutes ago, hishnash said:

but it is still nasty and has some very MS style edge cases.

I see what you did there, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. 

[LAwLz]

It's good that they are making this extension package format for adding support for new codecs, but it is not the proper way of doing things.

Users should not have to download and install some extension package to get support for web standards, they should work out of the box. By requiring users to download extra software packages to support these formats you are just making it so that developers can never be sure if the user will have support for it or not, and will need to add a fallback.

[GoodBytes]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's good that they are making this extension package format for adding support for new codecs, but it is not the proper way of doing things.

Users should not have to download and install some extension package to get support for web standards, they should work out of the box. By requiring users to download extra software packages to support these formats you are just making it so that developers can never be sure if the user will have support for it or not, and will need to add a fallback.

I hope it would be built-in in the next release of Windows 10. I doubt it, but yea, hope.

[GoodBytes]

9 hours ago, tjcater said:

Neat, hope this results in newer standards being adopted faster by sites. On a side note, I just found out that the Xbox store has edge extensions. (I know its the same UWP app and all, but didn't expect extensions on the Xbox store)

Neat, does this cover some of the previous codecs that needed to be installed separately? (Usually had issues getting them to properly install, just don't remember which codecs)

Edit: Well its seems like it doesn't, though I could be wrong

I don't really understand what you mean.

But the other codec that is as an extension is MPEG-2, which Windows will fetch it for you if you play a video with the default video player (Movie & TV app), if you play a video file that needs it. It does NOT play DVD's however, you need to pay for that. Here is to get it: https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N95Q1ZZPMH4

 

 

 

[Guest]

4 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

I don't really understand what you mean.

But the other codec that is as an extension is MPEG-2, which Windows will fetch it for you if you play a video with the default video player (Movie & TV app), if you play a video file that needs it. It does NOT play DVD's however, you need to pay for that. Here is to get it: https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N95Q1ZZPMH4

Yah, the codec I was thinking of was MPEG-2. On a few computers, I would get an error saying that the extension had failed to install.

[GoodBytes]

Good news everyone!

In the next update of Windows 10 (codename: RedStone4), the Media codec pack will be built-in. No need to install it after!

Source: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/12/19/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-17063-pc/

 

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Web Media Extensions Package: This build installs the Web Media Extensions package for Microsoft Edge, which extends Microsoft Edge and Windows 10 to support open-source formats (OGG Vorbis and Theora) commonly found on the web. Try out your favorite OGG content (such as Wikipedia videos or audio)!