Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Center

Windows Media Center is, of course, the premium environment in Windows for enjoying digital media such as photos, music, movies, and, yes, even live and recorded TV shows. But Media Center - which we discuss in detail in Article 13 - isn’t just for people with expensive home theater setups. There’s no reason you can’t use Media Center with a mouse and keyboard on your desktop PC or notearticle. In fact, you may find it quite enjoyable to do just that.

Windows Media Center is not available in all Windows Vista product versions.

You have to be using Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate to get Windows Media Center. 12-6, Windows Media Center is a seamless, home theater–like application that works best full screen but can absolutely be enjoyed in a floating, resizable window alongside your other applications. To use Media Center to manage your digital movies, navigate to the Pictures + Videos experience in the Start page and then choose Video Library. The first time you enter this area, Media Center will ask you if you’d like to choose other folders to watch for videos. If you’ve already configured either Windows Photo Gallery or Windows Media Player to watch particular folders, or you intend to only use the default folders for video content, you can select No; in that case, Windows Media Player uses the same database of watch folders as those other two applications. The Video Library experience, shown in article 12-7, provides a horizontally oriented grid of videos through which you can navigate by either name or date. To watch a video, simply select it.

Although Windows Media Center offers tag-based navigation for music and photos, it does not do so for videos. To navigate your video collection by tag, you’ll need to use Windows Photo Gallery.

In a related vein, you can’t tag, rate, or add captions to videos in Media Center only. Essentially, Windows Media Center simply offers a high-end place for video consumption. If you want to interact with videos, you’ll need to look elsewhere. And, as noted previously, Windows Media Center also works with live and recorded TV content. Although this content is technically digital video, we discuss this in more detail in Article 13, and later in this article where we talk about editing and republishing recorded TV content.

Using Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is Microsoft’s tool for creating digital videos. You can import a variety of digital media types into the application, including home movies, photos, music and other audio files, and even recorded TV shows. Then, using simple editing techniques along with professional transitions and effects, you can create completed videos that can be shared with others through PCs, e-mail, the Web, digital video tape or, in conjunction with Windows DVD maker, described at the end of this article, DVD movies. You may have heard of something called Movie Maker HD (where HD stands for high definition, as in HDTV). Technically, Movie Maker HD is not a separate version of Movie Maker, but is rather a description of features that Movie Maker gains in certain Windows Vista product versions. Here’s how it works. All versions of Windows Vista include Movie Maker, but only the versions in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate can import from and publish to HD video sources. You will need a fairly high end PC to manipulate such video, of course. Windows Movie Maker is a relatively straightforward application, assuming you’re comfortable with video editing. But even for the uninitiated, Windows Movie Maker is pretty easy to use. You just need to know your way around.

Understanding the Movie Maker User Interface

Windows Movie Maker is divided into three basic areas: The menu and toolbar at the top, the panes section in the middle, and the Storyboard/Timeline area at the bottom. 12-8, these areas are clearly delineated. Since the menu and toolbar area are similar to other Windows applications, we’ll spend most of our time discussing the other two parts of the Movie Maker user interface, which are unique to this application.

In the center of the application window, you’ll see the Tasks pane, with which you can literally step through the tasks needed to bring a custom video production to life, the Imported Media pane, in which you will collect shortcuts to digital media files on your PC that will be used in the current project, and the Preview pane, where you can preview your video creation as it is developed. At the bottom of the window is the Storyboard/Timeline pane. This area holds the edited version of your video project and can operate in two modes. Storyboard mode, which is the default, displays the digital media files that make up your video project in sequential order, and it presents small user interface slots for video effects and transitions, giving you a nice overview of the bits and pieces that make up the project. In Timeline mode, shown in article 12-9, you see a more literal representation of the video project, presented in a timebased display that is perfect for fine-tuning details of the presentation, such as timing. This is the mode you’ll use to trim audio and video clips. We recommend staying in Timeline mode for all but the simplest video projects.

Importing Digital Media into a Project To start a new project in Windows Movie Maker, you first need a collection of shortcuts to digital media files that will be used in your final video. Windows Movie Maker can import a variety of video, audio, and picture files, and these files can be assembled however you like in your project’s storyboard/timeline. Table 12-1 highlights the formats you can use with Windows Movie Maker.

To import a movie, photo, or music file into Movie Maker, you can click the Import Media button on the Movie Maker toolbar, choose Import Media Items from the File menu, or simply drag the files into the Imported Media pane from any Explorer window. Likewise, if you want to import content from a digital video camera, select Import From Digital Video Camera from the File menu and step through the wizard. Remember that digital video imported from your digital still camera can be obtained using the normal Import wizard that appears when you connect the camera to your Windows Vista PCs. These videos will be located in your Picture folder. In article 12-10, you can see a variety of media types located in the Movie Maker Imported Media pane. Editing a Recorded TV Show or Movie The simplest way to make a movie is just to grab any bit of media - be it music, picture, or video, though of course video works best - and take it to the Storyboard. Then, you can press Play in the Preview pane and watch your simple, unedited creation play through to completion. But typically, you’re going to want to make something a bit more sophisticated. So for this section, we’ll assume that you have a recorded TV show you’d like to edit. You will want to remove the dead space at the beginning and end of the show, edit out any commercials, and then save the show back to your hard drive in a highquality format. Later, we’ll even write this show to DVD, so you can watch it on any standard DVD player. The MS-DVR format is new to this version of Windows Movie Maker. This is the format Microsoft uses for its Media Center recorded TV shows. That’s right: You can use Movie Maker to edit TV shows. So if you’d like to save a movie or show you’ve recorded, edit out the commercials, or the dead time at the beginning and end of the recording, you can now do so. There is one caveat to this capability, however. Shows recorded on certain channels, such as HBO and Cinemax, cannot be edited (or, for that matter, copied to a different PC from that on which it was recorded). That’s because these shows are protected by so-called Broadcast Flag technology, which television stations can use to restrict copying. Currently, this technology is used mostly on pay cable channels in the U.S. market, but it will become more and more common as digital video recording (DVR) solutions like Media Center and TiVo become more prevalent.

If you don’t have a recorded TV show, perhaps because your PC isn’t connected to a TV signal through a TV tuner card, fear not. You can use one of the sample recorded TV shows that comes with Media Center, or a sample video file that ships with Windows Vista. Or, grab some of your own home video footage. It’s up to you. Recorded TV shows are stored in C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV by default. There’s no Recorded TV folder under a normal user account’s Home folder. That’s because recorded TV shows are shared by all of the users on the PC. Navigate to this folder and import a recorded TV show or one of the samples that Microsoft provides in C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\Sample Media. It’s time to start editing.