Windows Phone 7 audio & media codecs

It looks good to me, we have .AVI and MP$ for video containers so that covers things. I wasn't expecting support for something like mkv or ogm etc, but you can find many free and good mkv to mp4 converters out there.

Only thing I see as a major exclusion is xvid, since the zune hd even supports it

This list actually includes xvid because xvid (just like DivX) is a variant of MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile. mkv is a container, and usually contains MPEG-4 Part 10 (also called h.264) HD video, so all you'd need to do to watch your mkv file would be to remux it to a different container (mp4, for example). Remuxing is not recoding and only takes a couple of minutes per video.

So the good news is that this list contains almost everything you'll ever encounter in real life with only minor problems which are easy to solve, and this is by far the best out-of-the-box support available in the market. The only omission here is AC3 sound.

There's bad news, however, and that bad news came with April Refresh of developer tools. MPEG4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile was removed from the list of supported codecs. This means no support for your xvid/divx .avi files. Whether the list is now final remains to be seen, but currently it looks like you'll have to re-encode all SD content, while HD video will only require quick remuxing.

This is still way better than on other competing platforms including WM, but, unlike WM or Android, support for missing codecs cannot be solved by third parties as it will require native code. So unless Microsoft adds support or OEMs will do it for certain devices or somebody will write an application that will require jailbreaking, real-life video watching will be somewhat close to iPhone experience. That being said, even though nothing technically prevents ISVs to do video players for Android, everything that platform has sucks tremendously anyway...

So, for us English speakers, will it support DRM'd subscription tracks, like Rhapsody?

I'm very disappointed to see no FLAC there. My entire CD collection is in FLAC format and I don't want to have to convert to play :\ Quality is more important than file size to me.

FLV would be nice