Windows 11's media player idles at 377MB doing nothing, and the experts say the real story is older and worse
An article claimed the new player uses 3.5x the RAM and paywalls codecs. Credentialed commenters, including ex-Microsoft engineers, picked it apart: the player isn't new, the codec fees aren't new, and the genuinely new insult is losing Dolby audio.
By the article's own figures the modern player idles at ~377MB against ~103MB for the old one. The codecs it locks behind a fee, like HEVC, have been paid add-ons since the Windows 10 era.
The detail that stung an ex-Microsoft engineer: it's a native app with no web version that Microsoft still chose to build in HTML and JS.
The claim, and why insiders flinched
An ExtremeTech writeup reported that Windows 11's modern Media Player idles at roughly 377MB of RAM against about 103MB for the old player — a 3.5x jump "while doing absolutely nothing" — and that popular codecs are paywalled add-ons. The numbers are real; the framing got demolished. The sharpest correction came from someone who has shipped this class of software:
"This article is likely AI slop, none of this is 'news'… Windows 11 is not shipping a new media player, it has the same one as it has since Win10. Codecs… like HEVC/H.265 [have] always cost a very small amount of money, in order to pay patent owners." — Anaïs Betts, infrastructure engineer at Anysphere
Where the RAM and the fees actually come from
A commenter situated both halves of the headline in real causes — licensing pools and the drift to web tech inside native apps:
"Removing HEVC support wasn't their choice but probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices… As for the RAM increase, well that's probably a consequence of the general trend of doing frontend engineering via JS/TS instead of using OS native frontend APIs." — a commenter on the licensing and JS-frontend trends
That second point landed hardest with a former Microsoft engineer:
"I think what I find fascinating about this is it's a native app with no web version… and they still decided to write it in html/js. This is after Microsoft's commitment to rebuild things in WinUI." — an ex-Microsoft, ex-Figma engineer
For scale, a cross-platform baseline kept the outrage honest:
"As a certified MSFT's antifan, I've noticed Apple's Music.app uses roughly 580 MiB of RAM for comparison." — a commenter offering a macOS RAM baseline
The real new thing is the missing Dolby
Strip the recycled outrage and a genuine regression remains: the modern player drops AC-3 / Dolby Digital audio, so files that used to just play now go silent. That's the story worth telling — not "a new player is bloated," which is years old, but that Microsoft will ship a native HTML/JS app that idles at a third of a gigabyte and quietly removes audio support you used to have. The article got the affect right and almost every fact's provenance wrong; the thread, stacked with people who've built the thing, supplied the version that's actually true.
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