Once upon a time, Microsoft's approach to audio and video hinged on Windows Media Player and its file formats coming to dominate digital entertainment in much the way Windows dominates the Pc. Instead, we live in a world where multiple approaches to media flourish, and where iTunes and the iPod, not Microsoft-based products, are everywhere. Windows 7's new multimedia capabilities acknowledge this reality by emphasizing features that help the OS play well with others-including with products that hail from a certain company named after a piece of fruit.

Windows 7 aims to streamline playback, too-so much so that it offers two different lightweight ways to enjoy media without employing full-strength Windows Media Player. You can listen to music and watch video by using the preview pane in Windows Explorer, without launching Windows Media Player at all. Or you can load up WMP but work with a simple view that hides your media library and fits comfortably into a small floating window on your desktop, leaving the rest of your display visible (and usable).

No matter how you play your files, Windows 7 handles a bunch of non-Microsoft formats that Vista and Windows XP don't, including MC audio and H.264 video-the standards that Apple favors-as well as DivX video and AVCHD, a format that many high-definition camcorders employ. That ecumenical approach allows the media player to tap into Not surprisingly, it can't play music and movies shielded by Apple's FairPlay copy protection, but rather than listing them and then choking when you try to play them, it doesn't display the files at all. In our tests, the updated WMP handled unprotected MC music without a hitch; an H.264 video podcast that we downloaded from iTunes played, but it looked much blockier than it did when we watched it in iTunes on the same Windows 7 machine.

The new OS aims to play traffic cop for an array of media types an? devices that may live on your home network. It can find media stored on multiple PCs on the Internet (including ones in HomeGroupe on other Windows 7 PCs), and it can route media files from them to media-streaming devices that support the Digital Liv¬ing Room Network Alliance (DLNA) standard. If a particular piece of media is saved in a media format that a specific streaming device doesn't support, Microsoft says, Windows 7 will convert it on the fly.

When we controlled a Sonos home music distribution system through the Windows 7 preview edition, though, the experience was more than a little rough around the edges. Sonos's own software lets you give its players names like "living Room" and "Kitchen," but Win¬dows 7 identified them by cryptic IP addresses instead. And Windows 7 doesn't yet allow you to queue up playlists of songs to stream to a device on the network-we could send only one tune at a time.

Windows Media Center-the liber-application that does everything from recording live 1V to distributing Windows' media features to networked Xbox 360 consoles and other devices-continues on in Windows 7. Microsoft says that Media Center includes new Internet 1V features that give users a single program guide and a playback interface for video content from all over the Web. Again, that all sounds intriguing-but if these features are available in the Windows 7 preview edition we examined, they're so well hidden we couldn't track them down. Media Center also works with HomeGroup networking to let you find recorded audio, video, and other media files no matter where they're hiding on your network.