Thursday, June 4, 2009

Today's installer WTF

We bought my parents-in-law a Zune as a present (MSFT people get a discount at the company store). They have a pretty slow DSL connection, so downloading 131MB Zune software took almost 30 minutes.

But guess what happened next? When the setup started, it started downloading again - for another half an hour.


This begs two questions:
(1) What was in the original 130MB file - just a setup program? In 131MB???
(2) How big can a media player possibly be? Media Player Classic is less than 2MB, and VLC can play absolutely every file known to humanity in 16. Yes, Zune software also has transcoders, but I've got a whole bunch of these, too - and they are just a few megs in other packages. Why do we need a good quarter of a gigabyte?

5 comments:

Andy Robbins said...

This seems to happen quite often with big-company software...

Anonymous said...

Can't you find out, since you work there? Is there any communication between teams?

DzembuGaijin said...

iTunes 8.2 for Windows is 75Mb. Nit very small, but no extra download of course. For me it is just a few seconds. Not to mention that it is normally installed on Mac's.

What I believe is happens with Zune is that it has 2 locations for s/w: one for installer and second place that check for updates and they are not merged together.

Another option is Zune split s/w on two parts to make some kind of DRM validations and node locking and they download a "second half" under some cover, may be with some anti-debugging things.

But, yeah, I do not know. Not that 256Mb would scary me much if it would download and install fast ( and will work after that ) :-)

DzembuGaijin said...

VLC rocks of course. UI is FUGLY, but hey, it does play anything ;-) free and come with scr. Best Media Player Ever ! ;-)

Anonymous said...

begging the question police:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/begquest.html