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October 10th, 2007

Tech Shakedown #10: Windows Media Player's error dialog road to nowhere

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:30 pm

Categories: General, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Technology Shakedown, Video

Tags: Microsoft Windows Media Player, Audio, Windows Media, Media Player, Digital Music, Digital Media, Microsoft Windows, Media Players, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics

Today, I would have posted one of my video “reviewcasts” for you, but we ran into a production snafu. Here at ZDNet, our process for posting those involves me reviewing the audio before we finish off the post production. Sometimes, there’s material that’s worth cutting in the interests of your time (we don’t want to keep you longer than need be). But today, when I attempted to open the audio file of the nearly finished reviewcast (a WAV file that was on a USB key), I got a really strange error message from Windows Media Player that I can’t imagine anybody ever making sense of.

Thankfully, these are the days of the Internet and software developers like Microsoft can contextually link these error dialogs to their Web sites so as to provide end users some idea of how to overcome whatever problem faces them. But, as you’ll see in this technology shakedown, even though the dialog had one of those links, it didn’t get me very far.

David Berlind has been Executive Editor at ZDNet since 1998 and has been a technology journalist since 1991. Although he can't respond to all e-mails, he reads them all. You can reach David at david.berlind AT cnet.com. If you don't want the content of your e-mail to turn up in a blog entry, make sure you say so. To the extent that most e-mail he receives looks to sway his opinion about something, he usually looks to pass those points of view onto ZDNet's audience members for their consideration . For disclosures on David's industry affiliations, click here.
  • Talkback
  • Most Recent of 14 Talkback(s)
decoding error codes
vista is getting better at it, but too often you still have to go to the microsoft site and wade thru the KB to get an answer.

i, like kenneth, always do a print screen to capture the error, bu... (Read the rest)
Posted by: jiagebusen Posted on: 10/12/07 You are currently: a Guest | | Terms of Use
LOL, when is volume not volume  TripleII | 10/10/07
re: LOL, when is volume not volume  CobraA1 | 10/11/07
I did catch the subtle nudge to Vista in the video too  TripleII | 10/11/07
RE: Tech Shakedown #10: Windows Media Player's error dialog road to nowhere  yagijd | 10/11/07
The weird thing is...  dberlind | 10/11/07
David, if you like  No_Ax_to_Grind | 10/11/07
Ergh..I Have To Concur With You...  itanalyst | 10/11/07
Why use Media Player? VLC is better...  mrsfixit | 10/11/07
Creates too many other issues  No_Ax_to_Grind | 10/11/07
RE: Tech Shakedown #10: Windows Media Player's error dialog road to nowhere  nomoremicrosoft | 10/11/07
MS is horrible at "helping" with errors.  No_Ax_to_Grind | 10/11/07
Saving Error Messages  kenneth.kelley@... | 10/12/07
decoding error codes  jiagebusen | 10/12/07
LOL, would you expect anything less from Microsoft?  mikifinaz1@... | 10/12/07

What do you think?

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