Quote: Originally Posted by
danielkh 
...who would you trust more for your music and video services and codecs?
By limiting your player, you limit people blaming YOUR software for problems. Perfect business decision IMHO.
eh, I know you didn't confuse open source with open standards, another post earlier than yours did. I was just lumping my responses to everyones posts into one. My bad...
IMHO, and I seem to be alone in this, I would trust a player that I can actually see what it's doing. I'd like to believe the end user would chose a peice of software that has open access. It's amazing to me how BSD has gone so long without a major vunerability even though hackers have full access to the code. Inside the "black-box" that is MS software, I have no idea what it's actually doing. And if the player has a problem, I have to wait a long time for MS to fix it. At least I can freely patch mplayer or gstreamer and not have to wait for someone else to fix it.
To the end user, if an app you depend on has a problem, you have a problem. There's really no difference in the user's eyes.
It's smarter to abstract your code away from any specific player so if the time comes that you run into a wall, you can just write another wrapper around another player, drop it in and run.
@jmbickham: Excellent point about the slow movement of the auto industry.