There’s more to Windows Media Player than ripping and burning CDs. Media Player can play digital media stored on DVD, Enhanced DVD, VCD, and SVCD disks. It can play video files you acquire online or create yourself in Movie Maker. And you can even use it to manage pictures and copy them to portable devices. If you have Media Center with your version of Windows Vista, you can use Media Player to manage and watch Recorded TV.

Watching DVD, VCD, and Such

If your computer has a DVD drive, you can use it to watch DVD movies— including movies you buy or rent at a movie store, as well as DVDs you create yourself using Windows DVD Maker. You can use the techniques described here to watch VCD and SVCD disks. You don’t need a DVD drive for those kinds of disks; a CD drive will do.

First things first

Before you get started watching video, you should be aware that there are many different kinds of codecs associated with video. A codec is a compressor/decompressor, a file that needs to be installed on your system to see (and hear) certain types of videos.

Windows Vista comes with a built-in DVD decoder, which allows you to watch the vast majority of DVDs without any fuss. But occasionally you’ll come across a situation where you get video but no sound, or sound but no video in a movie. That’s because the movie uses a codec that isn’t built into Vista. In many cases, Media Player will be able to download the codec automatically. But only if you allow it to. Follow these steps to allow Media Player to download codecs on an as-needed basis:

1. If you’re in a Standard user account, log in to an account with administrative privileges.

2. Open Media Player (Tap the Windows key, type med, and click Windows Media Player).

3. Click the arrow under Now Playing and choose More Options.

4. Click the Player tab in the dialog box and make sure that Download codecs automatically is selected (checked).

5. Click OK.

Nothing will happen on your screen. All you’ve done here is ensure that if a codec you need is available as a free download from the Internet, Media Player will go get it for you when you need it. Of course, your computer must be online when the codec is needed.

The www.free-codecs.com Web site offers many codecs that you can download for free. The K-Lite Codec pack is an especially popular one that solves many problems with missing audio and video in movies. But Media Player can’t download that one automatically. You have to download and install it yourself from the Web site. The new AutoPlay feature lets you set defaults for all kinds of CDs, DVDs, and many devices. Setting defaults for DVDs

You can choose a default program for playing DVDs. The default program is the one that opens automatically and plays a DVD when you put a DVD disk in your DVD drive. Here’s how to set your default player:

1. Insert a commercial DVD disk into your DVD drive.

2. If the program you want to use as your default player starts playing the DVD, skip the remaining steps. Otherwise, close the program that opened and continue with these steps.

3. Open your Computer folder (click the Start button and choose Computer).

4. Right-click the icon that represents your DVD drive and choose Open Autoplay. You should see a dialog box, but the options available to you depend on the programs currently installed on your computer.

5. If you want all DVD movies to start with the program you select, choose (check) Always do this for DVD movies.

6. Click the name of the program you want to use as your default player (in this article I’ll assume you chose Windows Media Player).

You can also choose a default DVD player through the AutoPlay page of Control Panel. Click the Start button, choose Control Panel, click Hardware and Sound, and then click AutoPlay. Then use the DVD and Enhanced DVD options to choose default programs. Playing a DVD or VCD

To play a DVD (or VCD), put the disk into the drive and wait a few seconds. Assuming that you chose Windows Media Player as the default player, the movie should start playing within a few seconds. If it plays full screen, right-click the screen and choose Exit Full Screen to get to the Windows Media Player program window. If a movie loads but doesn’t start playing, click the arrow under Now Playing, and choose the first option, Play. . . . When the movie is playing in Windows Media Player, you’ll see the controls.

The controls in the window are similar to controls on a DVD player, with a few extras. Here’s how they work:

- Now Playing: Click this button to watch your DVD. Other buttons will show other information relevant to music in your library,  If the DVD isn’t playing, click the arrow under this button and choose the Play option.

- List Pane: Shows the contents of the CD. Double-click a title or scene to play it. Use the arrow under Now Playing to show or hide the List pane.

- Stop: Stops playback and rewinds to the beginning of the movie.

- Previous/Rewind: Click to go to the previous scene. Hold down the left mouse button to rewind.

- Play/Pause: Click to pause or resume playback.

- Next/Fast Forward: Click to skip to the next scene. Hold down the left mouse button to fast forward.

- Mute: Turn sound off. Click again to turn the sound back on.

- Volume: Adjust the sound volume.

- View Full Screen: Switch to full screen mode. In full screen, right-click for playback controls or to exit full screen back to the Media Player program menu.

- DVD Menu: Offers options similar to those on a TV DVD player for watching the movie, as summarized here:

- Audio and Language Tracks: Choose the spoken language of the movie.

- Lyrics, Captions, and Subtitles: Show or hide closed captions.

- Root menu: Takes you to the opening menu for the DVD. Typically offers options like Play Movie, Scene Selection, Language, and so forth. Click any item on the main menu to select it.

- Title menu: Takes you to a menu of titles, if available, on the current DVD. If the Root menu option does nothing, try this one instead.

- Close menu (resume): If you clicked Root menu during playback, you can then click this button to resume playback where you left off.

- Back: If the movie you’re watching contains Internet links and you’re navigating through Internet pages, it works like the Back button in a Web browser, taking you back to the previous page.

- Camera Angle: Lets you choose a camera angle on DVDs that offer multiple camera angles.

- Capture Image: Takes a snapshot of the screen and puts it in the Windows Clipboard. To see the image or save it as a file, open a graphics program and choose Paste from its menu or press Ctrl+V.

- Update DVD Information: If the DVD you’re viewing has media information on the Internet, choosing this option will download media information.

Choosing the screen size

As your movie is playing or paused, right-click on the movie. Or right-click an empty area to the left of the play controls and choose View  ->  Video Size. Then choose options as summarized:

- Fit Video to Player on Resize: If selected, this option prevents Media Player from cropping the movie when the size of the video is larger than the program window. When you resize the program window to smaller than the dimensions of the video, the movie is resized as well.

- Fit Player to Video on Start: If selected, Windows Media Player automatically resizes its own program window to avoid cropping out a portion of the movie when you first start playing a DVD movie or video.

The recommended setting for the preceding options is to leave both on (checked). Options lower on the menu size the visible video image as a percentage of the movie’s actual dimensions:

- 50%: Plays the movie at half its actual size (same as pressing Alt+1).

- 100%: Plays the movie at actual size (same as pressing Alt+2).

- 200%: Doubles the size of the movie (same as pressing Alt+3). You’d more likely use this option for small video clips than a DVD movie.

- Full Screen: Expands the movie to full-screen size. To quickly switch between full screen mode and the player window, press Alt+Enter. In full screen mode, you can right-click the screen for additional options.

Preventing screen savers during playback

If Windows is configured to play a screen saver after a period of inactivity, you probably don’t want that kicking in while you’re trying to watch a movie. To prevent your screen saver from disrupting your movie, follow these steps:

1. In Media Player, click the arrow under Now Playing and choose More Options.

2. Clear the checkmark next to Allow screen saver during playback.

3. Click OK.

Setting parental controls and language defaults

You can set parental controls to prevent children from watching DVDs above a specific rating. You can also choose a default language for DVDs that support multiple languages. Here’s how:

1. In Media Player, click the arrow under Now Playing and choose More Options.

2. In the Options dialog box that opens, click the DVD tab.

3. Under DVD Playback Restrictions, click the Change... button. Then use the button in the Change Rating Restriction box to choose a maximum rating (like G or PG-13) and click OK.

4. Optionally, to choose a default language for DVDs, click Defaults.

5. Choose a language for audio, caption, and DVD menu languages, and then click OK.

6. Click OK to save your settings and close the dialog box.

Internet Video In Windows Vista

There are two ways to watch video on the Internet. There are streaming videos, which you can watch but not download. And there are video files, which you can watch or download. When you download a video, it becomes a file on your own hard disk, which you can then add to your media library. It’s not always easy to tell the difference. But making Windows Media Player the default player for videos that it can play helps. I’ll talk about that more in a moment. Video files on the Internet also come in many formats. Some, like Apple QuickTime, won’t play in Media Player at all. But as I’ll also discuss in a moment, there are ways you can convert videos from incompatible formats to compatible formats. First let’s talk about making Media Player the default player for Internet videos.

Downloading video files

There are a couple of ways to download video files from the Internet. In some cases it’s easy to tell that the file is available for download, because the site tells you how to download the video. The usual procedure starts with the link that, if clicked, would play the video. Instead of clicking that link, you can right-click and choose Save Target As.

Whether you use Save Target As or File  ->  Save As to save the video, you’ll be taken to the usual Save As dialog box. There you can navigate to the folder in which you want to save the file. For example, to put it in your Videos folder, click your user name in the breadcrumb menu and choose Videos to open your Videos folder. Optionally, change the filename (but not the extension) and click the Save button. If all went well, you can play the video at any time by opening its icon in your Videos folder.

Playing downloaded video files

After you’ve downloaded a video file, there won’t be any need to go online to view it. (That was the whole point in downloading it in the first place!) Just open the folder to which you downloaded the file and open the video file’s icon. If you downloaded to a folder that’s monitored by Media Player, you can also play the movie from your Media Player library.

Ripping DVDs In Windows Vista

DVD-Video disks contain folders and files specifically designed to work with DVD players rather than computers. When you view the contents of such a disk on a computer, you typically see a folder named Video_TS. You might also see a folder named Audio_TS. But that folder is mainly used for DVDs that contain audio only, no video. When you open the Video_TS folder to view its contents, you’ll likely find folders with .VOB, .IF, and .BUP filename extensions. The VOB files are actually mpeg files, and are the only ones that contain video content. The IFO file contains information about scenes and timing. The BUP files are backups of the IFO file. These aren’t relevant to computers, so you can ignore them. If you double-click a .VOB file, it may not play. However, there is a trick that often works to get them to play. It won’t work on copy-protected commercial movies. But it might work with other kinds of DVDVideo disks. The trick is to copy the .VOB files to a folder on your hard disk. Then rename each .VOB file so its filename extension is .mpg. Make sure you can see filename extensions before you do. Otherwise you’ll just add .mpg to the filename without changing the .VOB filename extension. Even if you can copy .VOB files and rename them to .mpg, there’s no guarantee that all of them will play when you double-click the icon. There are codec issues that might prevent some of them from playing properly until you acquire the correct codec. When the copy-and-rename trick fails, DVD ripping software might succeed. These are programs that copy the .VOB files and convert them to a more computer-compatible format at the same time. Again, they won’t work with copyright-protected content. (You don’t want to copy those anyway, because it’s illegal.) Most DVD-ripping programs will let you copy to AVI, MPEG, or WMV, all of which are compatible with Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker.

Deskshare’s Digital Media Converter (www.deskshare.com) and AVS Video Tools (www.avsmedia.com) are inexpensive programs that provide both DVD ripping and file type conversion.

If you have a DVD recorder or a video camera that records to DVD, ripping can be even trickier. You’ll need to study the documentation that came with your recorder for the specifics. There’s not much I can say in a Windows article that would apply to every make and model of digital video recorder and camera on the market. But I can tell you how it works on my own DVD recorder, and that might give you some clues. On my own DVD recorder I have to initialize the disk for Video Mode (rather than Video Record [VR] mode). And after recording a TV show, I have to finalize (close) the disk. I imagine the same basic idea applies to many other DVD recorders as well. You’ll still have to copy and rename .VOB files to .mpg, or use DVD-ripping software to rip content from the finalized DVD to your hard disk.

Converting Video Files

Windows has no built-in capabilities for converting video files from one format to another. But there are third-party programs that can do such conversions. You can try the AVS or DeskShare program mentioned in the preceding Tip. Or search a download site like www.tucows.com or www.download.com, or even Google, for such programs. To narrow your search, first know the file extensions of the files you want to convert, and use those in your search. For example, if you want to convert MOV files to WMV files, search for Convert MOV WMV. The two DVD-ripping programs I mentioned in the previous section, Digital Media Converter and AVS Video Tools, both offer many options for converting video files. In fact, that’s their main purpose. Of course, products change and evolve over time. So if you’re thinking about buying such a program, you should research both products, and perhaps others, to make sure the product can do what you need it to do.

If you want to convert from AVI, MPEG, or WMV to AVI or WMV, there’s no need to purchase anything. Instead you can import the video file to Windows Movie Maker. Then publish it to an AVI or WMV file from Movie Maker. Managing Pictures with Media Player

In a previous article you discovered ways to acquire and manage pictures with Windows Photo Gallery. There’s no need to bring that information into Media Player. But you can if you want to. For example, if you have a portable media device that displays pictures, you might want to bring the pictures into Media Player so you can sync music and video files. To view pictures in Media Player, the pictures need to be in a folder that’s monitored by Media Player. Or, you’ll need to add that folder to your list of monitored folders by clicking the arrow under Library and choosing Add to Library. To view pictures in Media Player, click the arrow under Library and choose Pictures. In the Navigation pane, you can view All Pictures, pictures by keyword, by date, and so forth.