3. Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Player
Most people think of Windows Media Player as a music player, and sure enough,
which focuses on digital music and audio. But the truth is, Windows
Media Player can also work with video and photo content as well,
primarily so that you can synchronize the content with portable media
players and share it with other PCs and compatible network devices.)
This capability isn't new to Windows Media Player 12, the version that
Microsoft ships with Windows 7. However, because videos do play
natively in Windows Media Player 12, it's possible that you might want
to manage videos, to some degree, in the player as well. Like Windows
Live Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player 12 is configured to
automatically monitor certain folders for digital media files, and
those locations include, by default, your Videos folder and the Public
Videos folder. No surprise there.
NOTE
Well, maybe there is
a surprise there. Windows Media Player, like Windows Live Photo
Gallery, doesn't automatically monitor your Videos library but instead
manually monitors the My Videos and Public Videos folders instead. And
there's no way to configure it to monitor other folders, as you could
with previous versions of the player.
To configure Windows Media Player to display just videos, select Videos from the Navigation pane, as shown in Figure 8.
From here, you can play, rate and rename individual
videos, but that's about it. You can't add tags from within Windows
Media Player, for example. (That is, if you right-click a video and
choose Properties, the resulting dialog provides no way to edit tags,
as you can with, say, Windows Live Photo Gallery, or from Explorer.)
Typically, you're using this application to simply play videos. That's
Windows Media Player's strong suit, and you can use the player's
various controls to change the size of the video, display it using a
nice full-screen mode, or even minimize the player to the system
taskbar and watch it there while you get work done.
When you do play a video file, either from the shell
or from within Windows Media Player itself, the player switches to a
new Now Playing mode that automatically resizes the application window
to match the size of the video (by default). As you can see in Figure 9, this new mode is attractive and space saving.
As the video begins playing, the playback controls
fade away, giving you an even cleaner look. To return to the player's
Library view, click the Switch to Library button in the upper-right
corner of the window. (The controls will reappear when you mouse over
the window.) Note that when you return to Library view, the currently
playing video continues to play, even though you can't see it anymore.
A Switch to Now Playing button in the bottom right of the Library view
enables you to return to the show.
NOTE
One nice side effect of Windows Media Player's
capabilities is that you can actually create temporary or saved
playlists of videos. That way, you can trigger a collection of videos
to play in order, or randomly. It's not possible to do that from the
shell or within Windows Live Photo Gallery. And if you save the
playlist, you can access it from Windows Media Center, described in the
next section.
