> Compare: Movietrailer Windows Media and the same movietrailer in QuickTime.

Okay, I did. The first thing that jumped out was the fact that the colors were much more vivid and seemingly true with the MS product. Note especially the beginning of the clips, the "ladies and gentleman" section. As much as it kills me to admit, the flesh tones and the greens, specifically, are simply better with WMP.

Installation of WMP9 can be VERY slow, depending on the Mac on which it is being installed. On a G5, it was fast, while on a iMac DV (G3/400), it was a dog, taking over ten minutes.

This version does not seem to play all of the media that the Windows or OS 9 edition can, but WMP9 does seem to cover a good deal of ground. I suddenly have access to NUMEROUS sites that just three days ago were inaccessible. Talking to a MS representative at a MacWorld, I was told that several of the older video compression schemes, which are included in the OS 9 version of WMP, were authored by third party companies who would probably never port their work to OS X and, accordingly much of this was out of Microsoft's hands. I had / have no way of knowing whether this was a lame excuse, the whole truth, or a combination of the two. If I have to guess, I would think this WAS / IS an obstacle, but not an insurmountable one (e.g., VLC and MPlayer are capable of decoding most of this media) if MS really wanted to tackle it. With that said, there may be legal / contractual roadblocks.

Bottom Line: WMP9 does seem to work well for me (despite a VLC commandeering issue and no real way to set handling defaults). While it does seem a bit feature poor in comparison to the Windows variant, for me, over the past three days, WMP9 for X has been stable, usable, and welcomed. Thank you Microsoft.