Media Center provides an easy way to view and manage your media files. The new media streaming capabilities help you to share music, video and photos across your network, and there are some great new games. But despite this, there's plenty of room for improvement.
Windows Media Player can't by default play all the file types you need, so we're enhancing it with the Windows 7 Codec Pack: it can handle formats such as MKV, DivX, FLV and more. We've also included the Lagarith codec, which uses a lossless algorithm to compress video files. It's perfect if you're editing videos, as you can work on and save clips multiple times with no loss of quality (and without gobbling up the gigabytes of hard drive space you would need to save uncompressed video).
Of course ideally you'd avoid Windows Media Player where possible, as it's slow to launch and uses more than its fair share of your system resources. That's why we've included the media player VLC in the PC Plus Service Pack. It plays considerably more file types and is packed with bonus features, yet remains a fast and lightweight tool.
If you still play classic old DOS games then you'll know that it's more difficult than ever to get them working on modern PCs. DOSBox can often help by emulating DOS and all the ancient hardware these games might need: 80286/386 CPUs, archaic screen resolutions like Hercules or VGA, SoundBlaster soundcards and more.
And while Windows 7's new games are great, we still miss Internet Reversi. Unofficial Service Pack brings it back in the shape of Magic Reversi, which lets you play challenging games against the computer, a local player or even a remote player over the internet.
