Windows Media player is a horrid peiece of software, and not something I would recommend emulating.

There are plenty of native linux applications that can do what media player can:

xmms = music
beep-media-player = music
totem = dvds, movies and music
xine = dvd, movies
rythembox = music, library system similar to windows media player

However, don't knock wine because it won't work on one application I've used wine for more than a few things and all it takes is a bit of patience, love, and configuration.


edit: If you change wine's configuration to say windows XP then you get around that "os is too old" problem. But try to completely get away from WMP. Also, what OS are you currently running?