Digital Media Essentials in C#

Creation UPC Symbol in C# Digital Media Essentials

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To make the Player background a neutral gray, slide the Saturation control to the far left. In this setting, Windows Media Player completely ignores the Hue setting and uses a light gray background. The border around video clips is always black.

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Many, but not all, visualizations can be displayed in Full Screen mode and are much more effective that way. The built-in Battery collection, for instance, allows you to specify the display size when used in full-screen mode. To access these settings, click the arrow beneath Now Playing and click Options on the Visualizations menu. Select Battery and click Properties to display the dialog box shown in Figure 15-5. The resolution settings allow you to specify how many pixels to use in the Player window and in Full Screen mode.

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Figure 15-5 For better performance and display characteristics, adjust the settings for a Full Screen visualization.

The simplest way to nd more visualizations is to click Download on the Tools menu and then choose Visualizations. This takes you to Microsoft s of cial list of supported downloadable visualizations. For even more skins and visualizations, visit Microsoft s Windows Media Plug-ins site, http://www.wmplugins.com. http://www.wmplugins.com. For a lengthy list of links to non-Microsoft sites that offer Windows Media Player add-ins, see Microsoft Windows Media developer Zach Robinson s excellent Windows Media Player Mini FAQ at http://www.vista-io.com/1502. http://www.vista-io.com/1502.

If you don t see visualizations in Now Playing, choose View, Visualizations. If No Visualization is selected, choose a different menu option. Also, note that the Player cannot display visualizations during playback of MIDI les, and visualizations might not work for CD tracks when the CD drive is set for analog playback.

In general, Windows Media Player produces output that is commensurate with your hardware. The better the sound card, speakers, display adapter, and monitor, the better the performance you can expect. However, you can tweak a variety of settings to improve performance and to change the type of sound and video that Windows Media Player delivers.

Buried several layers beneath the Player s basic interface is an advanced playback control, first introduced in Windows Media Player 9 Series, that allows you to vary the speed of playback. This feature does much more than simply rewind or fast-forward a media clip; it performs time compression and expansion, slicing out short pauses, speeding up or slowing down the pace of playback but maintaining audio and video fidelity keeping a narrator s voice from sounding like a cartoon character when a video clip is played at faster than normal speed, for instance. This feature is especially useful in speed listening to podcasts, allowing you to blast through a downloaded program in a fraction of its normal running time while still being able to understand what the host and guests are saying. To adjust playback speed, click the arrow beneath the Now Playing tab and then choose Play Speed Settings from the Enhancements menu. The main Play Speed Settings control, as shown in Figure 15-6, is a slider that you can drag along a wide range. Drag to the right to speed up playback, to the left to slow things down. (Choosing a negative number causes a video clip to play backwards.) The Slow and Fast presets above the slider work at half-speed and 1.4X normal speed, respectively. Clicking the Previous Frame and Next Frame buttons, just below the slider in the Enhancements pane, pauses playback and steps through a video clip one frame at a time.

Figure 15-6 Click the slider (or use the preset Slow/Normal/Fast options) to change playback speed without distorted audio.

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Variable-speed playback doesn t work for all types of content; it s unavailable with streaming audio and video clips that are progressively downloaded, for instance. It s effective with Windows Media Video clips and audio files in WMA and MP3 formats. In addition, audio and video fidelity is only maintained at playback rates between 0.5 and 2.0.