Microsoft is pissing me off

When Apple announced Apple TV at MacWorld last week, I was so stoked, b/c it would finally in a convenient way let me get my music from my PC to my TV. Then my friend Danny asked me, "why, you already have an xbox 360". And so I thought about it and decided to give it another go.

Big mistake.


Freakin' MSFT. First I had to install a new version of Windows Media Player, version 11. Then I discovered that Microsoft, for some completely idiot reason, doesn't support .aac filetypes, which is what I have my entire library ripped in (b/c it's better audio quality). And since it doesn't recognize those files for it's library, it won't share them to the xbox (which *will* play them, by the way). And there's no way to force WMP11 to share specific files.

Pisses me off like crazy. I mean, AAC is STANDARD, not company-specific. It's like mp3 but more up-to-date. Apple supports it. And yes, songs from iTunes Music Store are in an Apple-specific flavor that nothing else will play either, but at least iTunes will play (and rip) basic .aac files. And MSFT won't even recognize them.

Truly annoying. By ignoring industry standards and trying to force their own thing, they've basically made my $400 Xbox 360 with all its "media center extender" capabilities a very expensive DVD player (and not even HD). Ridiculous.

I'm even more ticked because I tried *for the second time* to get it to work.


I cannot wait to get my Apple TV. Of course, I'll have to get a big screen TV for it to work...