Microsoft is slowly making Windows Media Player Legacy less useful, and their latest move is particularly telling. In Windows 11 Experimental Build 29648.1000 for Future Platforms, the old player’s caption controls have been restricted. Trying to enable captions now produces a message telling you to move to the modern Media Player instead.
Windows watcher Xeno Panther spotted this change first, and found that it’s specific to Experimental Build 29648.1000, as of now. Captions have stopped appearing in the latest Experimental 26H2 build, 26340.9212, so this would likely take more time to reach normal Windows 11 PCs.
Of course, the legacy player is so old that Microsoft doesn’t have to justify nerfing it. It’s clear that the company wants us to use the modern Windows Media Player, but we actually found a solid reason why Microsoft removed this particular feature from the legacy app.
Windows Media Player Legacy can no longer enable captions in the latest Experimental build
Right-click on a playing media and hover over Lyrics, captions, and subtitles in Legacy Media Player, and you used to get three options: Off, On if available, and Defaults, the last of which let you jump into deeper caption settings.
In Build 29648.1000, Off and Defaults are gone. Only “On if available” remains.
Try turning captions on, though, and Windows Media Player Legacy now throws a dialog that says, “Captions cannot be enabled in Windows Media Player Legacy. Move to Windows Media Player to enable captions.”
It may look like a bug but isn’t. It’s Microsoft blocking the feature and redirecting you to its replacement, which is absurd, and we’ll tell you why.
Windows Latest covered a Media Player update back in June that gave the modern app caption customization for the first time, including font size, color, and background to your Windows caption settings automatically, plus a quick link straight to those settings from inside the app. Caption styling in Legacy Media Player didn’t offer this level of control, but that’s not the point.
Legacy Media Player lost a perfectly working feature, so we’ll be forced to use the new caption settings in Modern Media Player.
Microsoft wants you to leave Legacy Media Player behind, but the modern app still has work to do
Microsoft nudging people toward its newer app would have been alright if the app was as fast and aesthetic as the one it is supposed to replace. However, as our testing showed, the modern Media Player falls short even on fundamentals.
Speed is the first problem. Legacy Media Player opens a video almost instantly. The modern Media Player takes noticeably longer to do the same thing, even on a relatively powerful PC.
Our testing found the modern app using around 377 MB of RAM just sitting idle, against roughly 103.4 MB for Legacy Media Player. That’s more than 3 times the idle RAM usage!
Codec support is the second, arguably bigger problem. Legacy Media Player, code that predates HEVC by well over a decade, still plays HEVC files without complaint. The modern Media Player doesn’t, unless you buy the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store for $0.99.
HEVC is the default format on basically every modern phone camera, so asking someone to pay just to watch a video they shot on their own phone isn’t a great first impression for Windows’ built-in player.
Legacy Media Player also still has the familiar library view and CD burning, and Microsoft continues to list it as an optional Windows 11 feature instead of removing it completely, even while pushing people toward the modern app for things like 4K playback.
This isn’t the first time Legacy Media Player has quietly lost a piece of itself. Its old Sync tab, used for transferring music to compatible devices, disappeared around 2023.
Of course, you can always go with third-party open-source media players that have a much larger feature set, while being optimized well to work on Windows. VLC would be the popular choice, but playing music could result in slow performance in the app, and as we reported, VideoLAN blamed Microsoft for this bug.
We recommend mpv player, as it’s also a free and open-source media player with a deliberately minimal interface and a strong focus on performance and flexibility.
Either way, Microsoft clearly wants the modern Media Player to become the default, and stripping capabilities from Legacy Media Player is one way to push people there. But that only works if the replacement holds up on its own merits.
Right now, it needs to open faster, use less memory at idle, handle HEVC without an extra purchase, and add some flair to the design, a sort of character that makes us want to use the app.
