Window Media Player 12

Windows Media Player 12, developed by Microsoft, is the release of Windows Media Player superseding Windows Media Player 11. It was first introduced in October 2008 at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference and has been released as part of the Windows 7 operating system. and has not been released for previous versions of Windows.
Windows Media Player 12 adds native support for H.264, Xvid and DivX video codecs, AAC audio and 3GP, MP4 and MOV container formats.
Microsoft has recognized AVCHD as one of the popular implementations of H.264 encoding scheme, and has file extensions M2TS and MTS pre-registered in the system. Windows Media Player is able to index content of these files, while Windows Explorer is capable of creating thumbnails for each clip.
The user interface has been redesigned such that the Now Playing view plays media in a separate minimalist window with floating playback controls, and also gives access to the current playlist, visualizations, and enhancements. Enhancements are housed in individual undocked windows. The library view includes the rest of the media management functions. It also can preview songs from the library when users hover over the media file and click the Preview button.Windows Media Player 12 uses Windows 7's libraries instead of its proprietary library database format and can play unprotected songs from the iTunes library. The taskbar-integrated Mini-player has been replaced with controls in the taskbar's interactive thumbnail preview (called the Thumbnail Toolbar) , albeit minus the volume control function, track and album information shown whenever a new song is played and the progress bar.
The taskbar icon also supports jump lists introduced in Windows 7.