Here's your chance to play around with WMP11 a few days early
For those of you who don't have access to the latest builds of Windows Vista and want to get a taste of Windows Media Player 11, here's your chance. Windows Media Player 11.0.5358.4826 has leaked and weighs in at 22.9MB. The leaked download is in RAR format. Once extracted, you'll install the WMP11 runtime first, then you'll install the actual application.
For those of you unfamiliar with the new features in Windows Media Player 11, here's a snippet from Paul Thurrott's overview of the application:
Aside from the wonderful visualizations, WMP 11 is improved in many other ways. First of all, it's considerably simpler looking than previous WMP, with a nice tabbed-based navigation scheme across the top of the window. Each of these tabs hides a multitude of context-sensitive additional features, however. When you click the little down-arrow under Library, for example, you'll see various media library-related options, including options for switching the view from music to pictures, video, recorded TV, or other media content (it is called Windows Media Player, after all).