The next time you go to do a clean install of Windows, depending on where you're located,
you may notice N editions of Windows. So Windows Pro N, Home N,
and so on. And I'll also point out that prior to a few years ago, you may have also seen a KN
version. What does that mean too? So what is it? Well, it's actually pretty simple.
Each N and KN version of Windows is exactly the same as its non-N counterpart,
except that it does not have Windows Media Player installed, as well as several other
media related features. I'll go over the exact differences later,
I literally looked up all the packages behind the scenes that are not installed.
So we can look at that. As for why it's called the N edition? Well, it literally just stands for,
"Not with Windows Media Player." And the KN is just a version that's in Korea. So the K
is for Korean. So why does Microsoft have these different editions? Well,
the answer is they have to, they don't have a choice about it.
You see, starting with Windows XP in 2004, a European Commission for the European Union decided
that Microsoft basically had a monopoly and was abusing Windows Media Player specifically as a
feature and was, I guess, pushing other media players out of the market. And so they ordered
Microsoft to create a version of Windows that did not have Windows Media Player bundled with it.
And in 2005, a Korean court specifically made a similar decision. So they also required a version
to be created without Windows Media Player. And that one was just called KN. And I believe the
only difference is the KN only has English and Korean as the languages. Going back to why they
named it N specifically, Microsoft originally wanted to call it "Reduced Media Edition."
And the European commission said no, that's too negative. It'll turn customers off. So
they suggested the N Edition as more neutral, and that's what Microsoft went with. Now,
I do want to importantly point out that even if you do install the N version of
Windows and you want to get all the features and you change your mind,
Microsoft does offer a Media Feature Pack that you can install to get almost all of that back.
And I'll also get to that a bit later. Now, one more quick fun fact,
I was looking for Windows 11 KN editions, but I could not find any version of Windows,
even 10, passed around 2016. So I looked up the translation of the original court proceeding,
and it turns out that they were only required to have the KN Edition for 10 years.
And since that was in 2006, I guess it expired. So the KN edition should not
be around anymore. You won't probably find it. As for that N edition that is
required by the European Union, I looked through that and did not see any kind of
expiration date. So I guess that one is just going to be around forever.
So let's dig into the more exact specific differences between the N and non-N versions.
For this testing, I did Windows 11 Pro and I used the August 2023 version of the installer ISO.
So it should be the most up to date. I use the PowerShell command Get-AppxPackage, which is a
command to list all the packages, which are a type of installation, program on the Windows computer.
And you can see it lists them all. And I copied the lists from the Pro and Pro N. And after a bit
of work running comparisons and cross-referencing the actual names from the Microsoft store,
I ended up with this resulting list of packages that are in Windows 11 Pro,
but not Windows 11 Pro N. And it's pretty much what you would expect.
What's funny is the Media Player and Movies & TV is still called Zune Music and Zune Video. I mean,
that's a throwback. Then you have some codec extensions. Then you have a bunch of
Xbox related stuff and the sound recorder. And Microsoft does have on their website,
a more user-friendly version of basically the same list.
Although this one does mention Skype, which didn't come installed in mine. But the excluded
features are not really the whole story because in addition to those that are just removed outright,
there's a lot of other features that rely tangentially on a lot
of these Windows media player features. And Microsoft does list those on the site too.
And you can see that quite a lot of things are affected, like the alarms and the clock,
the sounds won't play, application sync doesn't work as a feature,
Cortana. I don't think anyone's sad about that, but that won't work. And you can just read through
the rest of these. A lot of it has to do with sound, but also playing most kinds of videos.
The Snipping Tool does work, but you can't do the screen recording, and so on. So that is a pretty
big hit that you would have to take if you install that version. It is missing not just features,
but also makes a lot of other stuff just not work. Now I did mention Microsoft does have
a way that you can reinstall most of this, and that is through a Media Feature Pack.
If you go into the optional [features] in 10 or 11, and if you look through them,
one of them will be the Media Feature Pack. Although I want to point out this
will not show up if you don't have the N edition. So most of you will not be able
to see this. However, even that does not necessarily reinstall everything.
Microsoft on one of their pages actually does say that even installing the feature pack,
you might have to manually reinstall certain programs. They mentioned some codecs like VP9,
web media extensions, and the ones for video and images. Also Skype,
the Windows Movies & TV app, Windows Media Player, Xbox Game Bar, and the Windows Voice Recorder.
And I believe you can get all those just from the Microsoft store. I also found a
page that Microsoft had where you could directly download the actual file to install the media
feature pack. And this was for Windows 10. I couldn't find one for Windows 11,
but I wanted to look inside and see what was in there.
It was an MSU file, which apparently WinRAR and 7-zip can just open. And
I was looking through it. There was a whole bunch of list of packages. However,
most of these were just different languages for the same ones. So finally I ended up filtering
it down to one of each, and I got this list. I'm not going to go through all of these obviously,
but you can see here that it's quite a bit more specific than just the packages we saw before,
which probably had a lot of these bundled together.
Again, this is for Windows 10, so it's probably different for Windows 11,
but it can give you an idea. And with that being said, I definitely went into more detail than
you probably needed to know, but that's my whole thing. So if you enjoyed this video,
definitely give it a big giant thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm.
And also if you want to consider subscribing, be sure to do that. I try to make videos twice a
week, usually Wednesday and Saturday. Also, let me know down in the comments what you think. Did you
ever install the Windows N edition or did you not know what it was and just kind of pass by it? If
you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is where I was going over three Windows
features that you should disable for security purposes that not a lot of people know about.
I'll put that link right there you can click
on. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.