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Ed Bott has an interesting article up called Five things every Windows beta tester should know. In hit he defends – somewhat – the decisions made by the Windows 7 development team to run the beta process as they are. It is basically a direct response to community criticism that accused Microsoft of not listening enough to Windows 7 beta testers. It basically boils down to the influence that the beta testers – at least the more prominent ones – actually have and want. There is a discrepancy between those two which is the source of all the criticism that Microsoft is currently facing.

Is it problematic if Microsoft is handing out a more or less feature complete version of Windows 7 to the beta testers? Was not it always the case that beta testers were mainly there for finding bugs and problems in the software rather than suggesting new features? While it surely cannot hurt to provide Microsoft with insight about features or changes to existing applications it should probably not be priority number one. And Microsoft did change some of the behavior in the operating system thanks to criticism and suggestions by beta testers, think of the UAC behavior in Windows 7 for one.

Source: Windows 7 News

One of the main points of criticisms in previous Windows operating systems was the lack of supported video codecs. Users always had to rely on third party codecs or independent video players to play some of the most common video formats properly. We already mentioned that Windows 7 will contain additional support for popular video codecs including the Divx codec. A recent post on the changes of the Windows 7 Release Candidate hint at another codec that will be added in Windows 7.

Talks are that Windows 7 will include a native codec to play .mov files without the need for Apple Quicktime or third party video players that support the video format. The information is somewhat hidden under the Windows Media Player entry in the list of changes, it states:

Customers loved the increased range of formats natively supported by the Windows 7 Beta, but noticed areas where they wanted broader support. For example, one was unable to seek to a specific spot in the video in Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center for AVCHD content that was imported from a digital camcorder. We’ve addressed this. Also, while the support for video from some digital cameras worked great, we also got feedback about supporting a broader set of devices out of the box. We’ve since added support for Windows Media Player to natively support the .MOV files used to capture video for many common digital cameras.

That’s good news for Windows Media Player users who had to install multiple video and audio codecs to add support for those popular file types in the past.

Source: Windows 7 News