Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Unfortunately, finding Media Center is a bit problematic.

First, Media Center is not available on Windows RT or the base version of Windows 8, which is called Windows 8 Core. Instead, you must have Windows 8 Pro before you can get Media Center.

Second, even if you have Windows 8 Pro, Media Center isn’t free: You can buy it for a small fee from Microsoft using the new Add Features to Windows interface. (You can easily find this through Start Search.) Why bother? If you have to ask, you don’t want Media Center. And frankly, the world has moved on anyway.

Figure 9-38:The full-screen Media Center music playback experience

The Windows 8 video experience revolves around a new Metro-style app, called Xbox Video, and some traditional Windows applications—Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center for playback and Movie Maker for video editing and sharing—which carry over from Windows 7.

The Xbox Video app is a bit more limited than that, actually. It can’t play DVD- or Blu-ray-based movies either.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the video experience is similar to that of music: The Metro-style Xbox Video app works well enough for video playback on tablets, other portable devices, and PCs, and for browsing Microsoft’s new Xbox Video Store online, but doesn’t offer any advanced features. If you want to do more with videos, like edit your own home movies and share them via online services like Facebook or YouTube, you’ll need to stick with the more productive desktop environment and those more mature Windows applications.

You’ll also need to stick with Windows 8, and not Windows RT. Note that Windows RT does not include or support Windows Media Player, Media Center, or Movie Maker.

Of course, what we’re most concerned with here is the new stuff. And that means the Xbox Video app.

If you’ve used the Xbox Music app described earlier in this chapter or are familiar with the video playback capabilities of the Xbox 360 video game console, the Xbox Video app will be immediately familiar. As you can see in Figure 9-39, this app is a typical, Metro-style full-screen experience that extends horizontally and looks and works much like the Xbox Music app.

Figure 9-39:The new Xbox Video app

And like the Xbox Music app, the Xbox Video app pushes Microsoft’s online store experiences over your own local video collection, offering Spotlight, Movies Store, and Television Store groups up front, somewhat obscuring your own media.

Frankly, with the prevalence and usefulness of online video stores like Microsoft’s, and the fact that most people simply don’t have massive collections of TV shows and movies as they do music, this isn’t as bothersome as it may be with the Xbox Music app.

You can find Handbrake at handbrake.fr.

If you do have a PC-based video collection for some reason—perhaps you’ve ripped DVDs to the PC’s hard drive using Handbrake or similar tools—or you’ve rented or purchased TV shows or movies from Microsoft—which we describe a bit later—this content will be found by navigating left to the My Videos group on the Xbox Video home screen. This group, shown in Figure 9-40, will show a selection of videos found in your Videos library.

You can click the My Videos title to view your own video collection in a full-screen view like that in Figure 9-41. Here, your collection is divided into All, Movies, TV, and Other categories, and you can sort the view in various ways.

Figure 9-40:The My Videos group is a front end to your own collection.

Figure 9-41:My Videos displays all of the videos found in your Videos library.

As you dive into your collection, by selecting a category and then an actual video, the Xbox Video app will display a pop-up for selected video, as shown in Figure 9-42, that offers a variety of options which includes some combination of the choices Play, Play on Xbox 360, Explore movie/series, Play trailer, and more.

The Xbox Video app, like the Zune PC software on which it is based, often misfiles videos, assigning many of them to the nebulous Other category. The only way to fix this that we’ve found is to install the legacy Zune PC software ( www.zune.net) and use that application’s Edit capability to change the video type of each file to the appropriate value (usually TV Series or Movies). Unfortunately, the Xbox Video app doesn’t provide any editing capabilities of its own.

Figure 9-42:Options for an individual video

These options work as they do in the Music app, of course, and will vary from video to video. For example, some videos will not have the Play on Xbox 360 button available because of compatibility issues.

Playing a video works as expected. When you click or tap the Play button, the full-screen playback experience appears, and will look something like Figure 9-43.

Anyone who’s fiddled with the iPad video playback controls will appreciate this.

These simple controls should all be pretty familiar. The timeline scrubber is a big, touch-friendly control that takes the guesswork out of finding the right place in a video, even on a tablet. And Play/Pause works exactly as expected.

Figure 9-43:The Xbox Video playback experience

In addition to the onscreen controls, you can display the app bar during playback to access more playback controls and other options. This app bar is shown in Figure 9-44.

Figure 9-44:The Xbox Video app bar-based controls

Available buttons can include:

• Download:This button will appear only on content you’ve purchased from Xbox Video Store. You’re free to stream this content at any time for the most part (there are exceptions related to “video window” issues, in some cases) and if you’d like to play this content offline, this button will make that option available.

• Delete:This will delete the currently selected video (if in your collection).

• Repeat:When toggled, the current video will play on an endless loop.

• Previous:This button rewinds the current video by 15 seconds.

• Play/Pause:Toggles video playback.

• Next:This button fast forwards the current video by 15 seconds.

We describe Play on Xbox 360 and the related Play To experience back in the Music section.