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Media Player Basics (Part2)
As is the case throughout this book, we assume you're familiar with basic operations in Windows and its many bundled applications. And Microsoft has included a very simple media player in Windows for over a decade, and a full-featured, all-in-one player since Windows Me.
Playing Music and Other Media As with previous Windows Media Player versions, you can easily select and play music in the media library. But the range of options you have for doing so has increased in this ver- sion, and Microsoft has finally put some often-needed playback options, like Shuffle and Repeat, right up front where they belong. To play a single song in Media Player, simply double-click the item. It will begin playing immediately. To play a complete album, double-click the album’s album art. Simple, right? Most items work this way in the media library.
In the bottom of the Media Player interface, you’ll see the new universal media playback control, which is centered in the application window and provides simple access to the most often-needed playback features. These are, from left to right, Shuffle, Repeat, Stop, Previous, Play/Pause, Next, Mute, and a volume slider. The use of these controls should be obvious, but what might not be obvious is how you trigger these features, plus other play- back controls, using the keyboard. These keyboard shortcuts are explained in Table 10-2.  Finding and Managing Your Music If you already have a bunch of CDs that you’ve ripped to the PC, or other digital media content, and you want to make sure you can access it easily from Windows Media Player, you should take a moment to tell Media Player where that content is. By default, Windows Media Player monitors certain folders for content. These folders include the current user’s Music folder, the All Music folder, the current user’s Pictures folder, the All Pictures folder, the current user’s Videos folder, the All Videos folder, and, if you are using Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions, the Recorded TV folder. Finding Your Music You can speed media detection by telling Windows Media Player to manually search for media. This can also be helpful when you’ve chosen to store media in a nonstandard location. To do this, click the small arrow below the Library button in the Windows Media Player 11 and select Add to Library from the resulting pop-down menu. This displays the Add to Library dialog box, which lets you manually find media and add other folder paths to the list of folders that Media Player monitors. By default, Add to Library displays in a super- simplified view style. Click the Advanced Options button to display the complete dialog box, as shown in Figure 10-8.  Figure 10-8: Add to Library is your one-stop center for finding media and adding it to your media library. To add nonstandard folder locations to the monitored folders list, click the Add button. Note that you can choose to add volume-leveling information to each imported file, which slows the importing process but ensures that each media file plays back at a consistent vol- ume level. This can be hugely important if you often shuffle songs from different sources. When you click OK, Media Player will manually search its monitored folders list for new media. If you want to manually add songs to the media library, you can also select them in Windows Explorer and simply drag them into Windows Media Player’s media library. Behind the scenes, Windows Media Player will not add those folder locations to its moni- tored folders list, but will only add the dragged media to the media library. Table 10-3 highlights the keyboard shortcuts used for managing the media library. 
Playing with Photos, Videos, and Recorded TV Shows In keeping with its name, Windows Media Player is about more than just music. You can also manage and access other digital media content, including photos and other pictures, videos, and recorded TV shows. For purposes of Windows Media Player, “recorded TV shows” refers to files that are stored in Microsoft Digital Video Recording (dvr-ms) format. This is the format used to record TV shows with Windows Media Center, which we exam- ine in Chapter 13. Accessing Photos with Media Player Unlike its predecessor, Windows Media Player does manage your photo collection by default (in Windows Media Player 10, you had to manually enable this functionality). To access your photo collection, click the Category button and choose Pictures. This will put the media library in Pictures view, shown in Figure 10-10. By default, you will see all photos.  Figure 10-10: Windows Media Player in Pictures view. When you double-click a photo in Pictures view, Media Player switches to Now Playing and displays the image in a slideshow with the other pictures around it. You can use the standard Media Player navigational controls to move through the playlist, shuffle the order, and so on. You can also click Back to get back to the media library. Media Player’s support of photos isn’t fantastic, and you should probably use Windows Photo Gallery — described in Chapter 11 — to manage your photos, because it includes decent editing tools. But there’s a reason Media Player supports photos: so you can syn- chronize them with a portable device and enjoy them on the go. We look at Windows Media Player 11’s support for portable media devices later in this chapter. Playing Videos and DVD Movies Because of its history as an all-in-one media player, Windows Media Player 11 is an excel- lent solution for managing and playing videos that have been saved to your PC’s hard drive. These movies can be home movies you’ve edited with Windows Movie Maker (see Chapter 12) or videos you’ve downloaded from the Internet. Windows Media Player also makes for an excellent DVD player.
You access digital videos in Media Player by choosing Video with the Category button. Videos display as large thumbnails in the media library by default, and double-clicking them, of course, plays them. Tip: You can make video playlists, which is actually pretty useful. Just open the List pane and drag over the videos that you want in a new playlist. Out of the box, Windows Media Player 11 supports a wide range of popular video formats, including MPEG-2, Windows Media Video (WMV) and WMV-HD, and AVI. But Media Player does omit support for a few popular formats, notably DivX and XViD, which are growing increasingly popular online, and QuickTime, Apple’s near-ubiquitous format for movie previews. Fortunately, there are ways around these limitations. To add support for the popular DivX and XViD formats, you can simply download files that will add support for these formats from the Web. The free version of DivX is available from the DivX Web site (www.divx.com/), whereas XViD codecs can be downloaded from www.xvid.org/.
In previous versions of Windows Media Player, you needed to download a $10 DVD decoder in order to add movie DVD playback functionality to the player. In Windows Media Player 11, this is no longer an issue: For the first time, you can now play DVD movies in Media Player without having to go to the pain and expense of finding and pur- chasing extra software. Tip: That said, Windows Media Player’s support for DVDs is pretty barebones, and you don’t get the wide range of functionality offered by third-party solutions such as Cyberlink PowerDVD (www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_1_ENU.html) or InterVideo WinDVD (www.intervideo.com/jsp/WinDVD_Profile.jsp). If you don’t mind paying a bit, these products offer features like intelligent zoom for widescreen displays and vari- ous headphone output modes that simulate surround sound. Playing Recorded TV Shows If you’re using a Media Center PC, or a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate edition and a TV tuner card that’s connected to a TV signal, you have the capa- bility to record TV shows (which we discuss in Chapter 13). TV shows recorded with Windows Media Center are aggregated by Windows Media Player 11 as well, and appear in the media library when you select Recorded TV from the Categories button. As with videos, recorded TV shows are shown in a nice thumbnail icon view by default. But if you already have Media Center on your PC, why would you want to access these shows in this fashion? Actually, there are a few reasons. First, you might want to synchronize your recorded TV content with a portable device so you can access it during the morning commute, on a plane, or in other mobile situations. That’s the primary reason this content type shows up in Media Player. But what about users with laptops? You might have Media Center on your desktop PC or Media Center PC, but if you’re running a different Vista version (or a previous version of Windows) on your notebook computer, you can use Windows Media Player to access that content: Just copy the shows you want to watch to your notebook, take them on the road, watch them, and then delete them when you’re done.
As you might expect, Windows Media Player supports a wide range of keyboard shortcuts that are related to videos, DVDs, and Recorded TV shows. Table 10-4 shows them.   CommentsNo Comments Post Comment |
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