In a $1.2-million soiree to launch Windows Media Player 9 at the swank Hollywood and Highland complex, Bill Gates & Co., sought to persuade Hollywood's high and mighty that the player is their best choice for encoding movies, TV shows, music and Internet streams -– much better than the much-touted MPEG-4 streaming standard.

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To make his case, Gates persuaded director James Cameron, Beatles producer Sir George Martin and music artist LL Cool J to pitch the player. And Gates himself paraded on a promo tape that had him "auditioning" for roles in Men in Black, Austin Powers, Star Trek and Titanic.

"Iceberg dead ahead," yelled Gates, clad in a sailor cap and suit in his film debut. "I'll call you," said Titanic director Cameron to Gates when they met on stage.

Appropriately, Fox's American Idol was filming next door, and Gates began his address to the crowd by warning, "There won't be any singing tonight, at least not by me."

The jokes were designed to lighten many Hollywood executives' image of Microsoft as an interloper intent upon controlling how their content is distributed over cable lines, the Internet, digital television and digital projectors.

So did the presence of luminaries like Cameron, who showed a high-definition, Windows Media 9 clip of his upcoming film Solaris (co-created with director Steven Soderbergh). Cameron, who used Windows Media 8 to broadcast deep-sea explorations of the sunken Titanic, said he plans to use the newest version of the software in other deep-sea Internet broadcasts he calls "adventure avataring."

Rap star LL Cool J put it more succinctly. "I'm pretty much brain-dead," he said, using Windows Media Player 9 to transfer one of his copy-protected songs from a PC to a portable audio device. "So if I can use this, anyone can."

In the patio outside, actor and comedian Sinbad said he liked the new player, but wasn't about to give up his Mac. And music impresario Quincy Jones, invited to the event by a nephew who works at Microsoft, noted amiably that the ailing music industry had better encourage consumers to listen to more music, not punish them for ripping it off.

Glitz aside, Gates said Microsoft spent $500 million to completely revamp its Windows Media Player, adding features such as instant-on streaming, surround sound, variable speed playback and an "InfoCenter" that gives users more detailed information about their media choices.

Perhaps most significantly, Microsoft executives showed clips they claim demonstrates that Windows Media Player 9 can create comparable video images to an MPEG-4 video streaming twice as fast. That means, in theory, that studios could cram high-definition movies into ordinary DVDs –- opening up a new market for DVDs for high-definition television sets.

Windows Media Player 9 "is a better alternative, hands-down, to MPEG-4," Dave Fester, general manager of Microsoft's Digital Media Division, said. "Why wouldn't content providers want to use it?"

Asked which major studios plan to encode with the software, he replied, "Stay tuned."

If Windows Media 9 does become a standard, what's that mean for the future of competing players like RealOne and Quicktime?

Apple Quicktime Director of Marketing Frank Casanova certainly didn't seem spooked, according to attendees who saw him chatting calmly with Microsoft executives after the event.

As for Real Networks, the company's presence was restricted to folks on Hollywood Boulevard carrying signs that read, "We play all major media types. The other guys can't."