Microsoft has offered official confirmation that Windows 7 will support third-party codecs, programs designed to make media players play nice with digital data stream or signal when it comes to encoding and decoding tasks. The Redmond company has underlined that it will in no way interfere with the addition of codecs to the next iteration of the Windows client. However, fact is that in the RC-branch releases of the operating system, Windows 7 has problems with third-party codecs. At the same time, Windows 7 is moving from Beta to Release Candidate stage, and in this regard the platform is bound to be affected by various issues.

“As we move toward the release of Windows 7, we have worked to add more codecs and file types to allow for a better user experience. We also allow Microsoft experiences to use codecs and other format technologies from third-party companies, just as we always have. Third party applications can use the Microsoft codecs or their own. Microsoft does not restrict the use of third-party codecs,” a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to WithinWindows.

Back at the end of March 2009, Damien Bain-Thouverez, a directshow developer, indicated that there was no way to remove, replace or override the mpeg4 and h264 codecs from Windows 7 Build 7057. This behavior has been indeed confirmed not only for Build 7057 of Windows 7, but also for the development milestone labeled with 7068, the latest Win7 release leaked into the wild and available for download via torrent trackers.

But it is important to note that the way Windows 7 behaves in pre-RC stage is not necessarily relevant to the final version of the operating system. Users need to keep in mind that while Windows 7 continues to be in development, and until it is released to manufacturing it is, Microsoft can potentially change the platform in any manner it pleases, from small tweaks to large overhauls. Preferably not large overhauls since I'm sure everybody is comfortable with a General Availability date ahead of the 2009 holiday season. In this context, the codecs issue in Builds 7057 and 7068 will undoubtedly be resolved by RTM, if not even earlier.