Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P40 docx

Book V Chapter 1 Playing a file from outside your Library To go directly to a collection or an individual media file somewhere on your laptop, the easiest method is to instruct WMP to sh

artists, genres, and other information or ratings)

If the List pane isn’t visible, click the Show List Pane button (a large blue arrow) The button is to the right of the WMP search box If the arrow points to the left, the pane isn’t displayed; if it points to the right, clicking the arrow removes the List pane

If the List pane already contains items, you can remove all of them at once by clicking the Clear List Pane button (a stylized red X at the top

of the playlist)

5.Double-click an item to begin playing it

If you selected a group or collection, all the items play; to select a single item only, drag the item to the List pane instead

Right-clicking a track opens the way to a Properties window with details about the bit rate and other details of the recording, in this case a subpar 128 Kbps disc

Some audio or video files contain markers, which are like tracks on a CD

or chapters on a DVD If the file you selected has markers, you can jump to any section by selecting a marker, and play audio or video from that point:

1.Click the View menu (part of the Classics Menu)

2.Point to File Markers.

3.Click the marker you want.

The WMP includes electronic versions of the familiar VCR control buttons The large right-facing triangle starts the selected item; once a piece of music

or video is playing, that icon changes to a pair of vertical bars that function

as a pause button On either side of the play/pause button you find a button that returns to the start or end of a file And finally, all the way to the left

is a square box that stops things See Figure 1-1

If you’re playing a recorded video, an added control sits just above the VCR-like buttons You can grab the Seek slider with the onscreen pointer and move it left to back up to an earlier part of the video; move the slider right to advance to a later section You may find it difficult, if not impossible, to grab hold of the little blue Seek button as it moves; click the pause button to freeze the image and then move the slider

Book V Chapter 1

Playing a file from outside your Library

To go directly to a collection or an individual media file somewhere on your laptop, the easiest method is to instruct WMP to show the Classics Menu

The menu bar gives you quick and easy access to most WMP options, including ones not shown in the player’s standard buttons

1.Press Ctrl + M key.

If it’s not already, the Classics Menu view turns on and the menu bar appears

2.Click File ➪ Open

3.Highlight the file you want to play.

4.Click Open.

Playing a file from a web page or at a network location Windows Media Player can control a file that lives on a web page, at a location on the Internet, or on a local network

To play a file on a web page, click the link on the web page

Figure 1-1:

Windows Media Player has identified a

CD inserted into the drive on my laptop (a relatively antique and certainly obscure mix

of operettas) and is ready

to play it

1.Press Ctrl + M.

2.Click File ➪ Open URL

3.Type the file’s URL.

4.Click OK.

Rocking the CD or DVD hardware Way back in the days of old, you needed a separate CD player to play a

music disc And for you really old folk, there was this thing called a record player that used vinyl platters and a tone arm with a diamond-tipped needle

the converted little squiggles on the platter into sound waves, at least until the needle finally wore a hole in the platter And you also used to need a DVD player to produce a movie’s video and audio Before then there was the suitcase-sized VCR, and before that? Well, you had to watch a television set or actually leave your house to go to a movie theater

But I digress: Today’s modern laptop computers are pretty close to being the master of all media A built-in optical drive can play high-quality music

or display high-resolution images from a nearly indestructible disc (because its digital information is read by pulses of laser light)

As delivered, Windows Media Player can play audio CDs or data CDs that

contain music or video files It can also display files written to video CDs (VCDs) VCDs are similar to DVDs, although the images’ quality and size

aren’t as large and the disc capacity is about 1⁄8that of a DVD

To play a DVD in your laptop, you need a DVD drive and the appropriate DVD decoder software installed in your system Some decoders are set

to work only with their own DVD player software, while others work also within Windows Media Player

You can — within the range of capabilities of your tiny laptop speakers — adjust some of the music’s tonal qualities and range by using the graphic equalizer that is part of WMP See Figure 1-2 The graphic equalizer adjusts the relative strength of the audio signal across its range from bass (in this case, 31 Hz) to high treble (16 KHz) You can also choose various effects that make your music visual, in the case of Figure 1-2, a fountain-like display that would be right at home out front of a Las Vegas casino

Book V Chapter 1

Controlling a CD with WMP Start the player first, and then insert a CD into the laptop’s optical drive

In most situations, your system is set up to start playing within WMP when

it automatically recognizes the presence of a disc

If the disc doesn’t automatically load (start), or if you installed the disc into

the drive before you started WMP, follow these steps:

1.Click the arrow below the Now Playing tab

2.Click the letter or name of the drive that contains the disc.

The CD starts playing from the beginning However, if you’d like to skip one or more tracks on a CD, follow these steps:

3.Click the Now Playing tab

4.Click the Next button

The icon shows two right-facing arrows and a single bar — the designer’s way of indicating fast-forward to the next section

If you change your mind and want to hear a song you skipped, double-click the song in the playlist It plays immediately

Figure 1-2:

Adjusting the relative strength of the audio signal across its range from bass to high treble

7.Click Eject.

This stops the disc and ejects it from the drive

Controlling a DVD with WMP Start the player and put a DVD into the drive Your system is probably set

up to start playing within WMP when it reads the disc

Playing chapters You can play video on WMP with these steps:

1.Start the player.

2.Insert a DVD into the laptop’s optical drive

If the disc starts automatically, skip to Step 5

If the disc doesn’t automatically load (start), or if you installed the disc

into the drive before you started WMP, follow Steps 3 and 4

3.Click the arrow below the Now Playing tab

4.Click the letter or name of the drive that contains the disc.

The video starts playing from the beginning However, you don’t have to

be a slave to the order Skip to different parts with these steps:

• To choose individual sections of DVD, click a DVD title or chapter name in the List pane

• To choose a specific part of a VCD, double-click a VCD segment in the List pane

5.Right-click the disc’s name in the Navigation pane

6.Click Eject.

This stops the disc and ejects it from the drive

Playing special features DVD creators can add from a palette of special features; Windows Media Player supports most of them Among them you may find are playing special features on a DVD such as foreign language dubbing, subtitles, “director’s commentaries” that substitute for or augment the actors’ words, and parental controls

To play special features on a DVD, follow along:

Book V Chapter 1

1.Click the DVD button

2.Click Root Menu.

The Root Menu is called Title Menu on some systems

3.Click the Now Playing tab.

4.Click the links to any available special features

5.Click the DVD button and then click Close Menu

This starts or resumes playback

On some DVDs you can simulate a camera-angle adjustment (Actually, it’s more of a viewing angle if you think about it, but they didn’t ask me when they named the feature.)

Click the DVD button

Select Camera Angle if it’s available

Choose the viewing angle you want to use

Follow these steps to use parental controls for DVDs:

1.Sign in as the administrator for your laptop

2.Create a Limited or Restricted user account for each person who’ll use the laptop with parental control settings applied

If you don’t set up your computer with Windows user accounts and passwords, you’re double-locking the front door while leaving the back door wide open

3.Start Windows Media Player.

4.Click the arrow below the Now Playing tab

5.Click More Options ➪ DVD tab ➪ Change Settings.

6.In Select a Rating, select the highest Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating that you want users with Limited/Restricted accounts to watch

As an example, if you select PG, the user with that account can’t watch a DVD with a more restrictive rating, such as PG-13 or R

Standard file types for WMP Windows Media Player plays back files recorded in many — but not all —

of the most common formats for audio, video, and images You can add supported file types by installing their codecs as supplied by third-party companies or by Microsoft

If you’re looking for additional codecs, Microsoft recommends visiting www.WMPlugins.com to search for officially endorsed system expansions; they warn that installing codecs from other sources may cause incompatibil-ities, file corruption, and dandruff Okay, I made up that last serious medical issue, but the other two problems are the sort of thing you want to avoid Table 1-1 shows the standard file types that Windows Media Player works with

Windows Media audio asx, wm, wma, wmx Audio Windows audio wav Audio MP3 Audio MP3, m3u Audio Windows Media wm, asf Video Windows Media video wmv Video Windows video avi Video Microsoft Recorded TV file dvr-ms Video Movie file mpeg, mpg, mpe, mlv, mp2, mpv2 Video Compressed image files jpg, jpeg, gif Picture Tagged Image File tif, tiff Picture

Windows Metafile wmf Picture Portable Network Graphics png Picture

What important file types are missing from this list? If your digital camera stores images in a RAW format, files of that sort aren’t supported by WMP; you should be able to change the camera settings to TIFF or JPG or use a different graphics program to process them Also not supported: animated GIF files, which you can view only as still images

Setting Windows Media Player as default program

As a multipurpose “player,” you can set up WMP as the default program for specific media types or for all its supported file formats You can also make

an AutoPlay setting so WMP is automatically used to playback CDs or DVDs that you put into your laptop’s optical drive

Book V Chapter 1

To assign WMP as the default player for a particular type of file, do the following:

1.Open a folder that contains a file of the type you want to change.

2.Right-click the file you want to change, and then click Open With.

3.Click the name of the program you want to use to open this file automatically.

4.Select the Always Use the Selected Program to Open This Kind of File check box

If you’d rather not have WMP as the default, deselect the check box

5.Click OK.

Menus, tabs, and classical music Microsoft’s engineers spent years trying to make every Windows application and utility look and act more or less the same; with the arrival of Office 2007 and Windows Vista they began to get jiggy with it Windows Media Player

is one of the products that has group-related tasks under tabs or in ribbons that mutate based on the tasks you’re currently performing or on the system’s guess about what you’re about to do next

In WMP, the old menu bar is still available even though Microsoft no longer wants to use that name; they call it the Classics Menu The quickest way to show Classic Menus is to open Windows Media Player and press the Ctrl + M key combination Press the same keys to go back to the future

If you want to get to the same place by a slightly more complex route, do this:

1.Right-click an empty area of the taskbar

2.Click Show Classic Menus from the popup mini-window

Good empty places include just to the left of the Now Playing tab or

a blank space to the left or right of the playback controls To hide the menu bar, reverse the steps and remove the check mark next to Show Classic Menus

WMP tabs are displayed even if you also turn on the Classics Menu bar

You can base your commands on the method that works best for you In my experience, the tabs work best for preset commands, while the menu bar

is the most efficient way to get into the program to make changes to settings

or configuration

visualization (you might call it a picture or an abstract image that pulses

in time with the music), shuffle items on your play list, repeat songs

on the list when all have been played, change volume and other audio settings, or switch to full-screen mode

✦ Library This section provides access to your digital media collection

and offers tools to organize them Click one of the items in the address bar (on the left side of the window) to choose among music, pictures,

or video You can also create, edit, or delete playlists (collections of

music sorted in any manner you choose)

✦ Rip Here’s the doorway to taking digital files from a CD and making

a copy on your hard disc for other purposes You change settings,

including the file format and the bit rate (the amount of information

collected per millisecond of audio)

✦ Burn Once you create a playlist, you can burn it to an audio CD for

replay in a home or car stereo system or other device This tab also includes adjustments to settings for the quality of the CD (including some basic audio-editing features such as making the volume of all songs equal across the entire disc)

✦ Sync Here you can bring songs back and forth between devices you

might attach to you laptop, including portable music players and memory devices

✦ Media Guide This gateway goes to an expanding number of online

stores that are ready, willing, and happy to sell you their services, including individual song tracks, entire albums, or online streaming services including satellite radio (converted to an Internet stream)

Rip It Good

Ripping is the process of copying music from an audio CD to a computer

If you use WMP to rip music, it reads the digital information on the disc and stores a copy on your hard disk as a WMA (Windows Media Audio) or MP3 file Both of these file formats use compression to reduce the size of the files; in doing so, some of the original CD’s quality is lost, although not all listeners can tell the difference between an original and the copy

Once you rip a file, you can play it directly from its storage place on the hard disk or download it to a portable music player (like an Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune) You also can burn the files to a CD as a personal mix or as

a copy of the original CD

Book V Chapter 1

Be aware that most music, video, and other intellectual property is

copy-righted and may be sold with a license that limits its use For example, the book you’re holding in your hand is copyrighted by the publisher, who has purchased that right from the author You have the right to read the book, give it to someone else, or resell it, but in general you don’t have the right

to photocopy its contents or scan it into digital form and store it away from the book itself

In general, it’s considered acceptable to rip a disc that you own but not so legal to make a copy of someone else’s music

The verb rip word contains a hint of its probable origin: “ripping off”

some-thing that doesn’t belong to you That may or may not be the case in your own system The thinking behind the legal hair-splitting is this: If you’re making a copy of something you own and don’t sell or give away the original, you still are only able to play the music on one device at a time But if you copy a disc and give it to someone else or share the digital file over the Internet, two or tens of thousands of people could play the music at the same time, and that wasn’t expected by the music owner when it was sold

in the first place

Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t support copying the contents of copy-protected video DVDs

Ripping a file is as easy as a click:

1.Place a CD in your laptop drive

WMP may immediately start playing the first song on the disc

You can rip a file while it plays, or you can stop playback and individu-ally select the tracks on the CD that you want to copy to the laptop

2.To stop playback, click the Now Playing button

3.Click the VCR-like square box.

4.To rip a file, click the Rip button

The software lists all the tracks on an audio CD; for nearly all CDs, the program can communicate with a Microsoft or third-party server for information about the disc including, in many cases, an image of the cover art See Figure 1-3

Windows Media Player adds ripped files to your Player Library During Windows installation, by default that location is set as \MUSIC under the user name currently signed in (for example, C:\Users\Corey Sandler\Music)

You can change the storage place for ripped files by displaying the Options dialog box (Display the Classic Menu toolbar, click Tools ➪ Options ➪ Rip Music tab.) See Figure 1-4