Monday, July 19, 2004
The One "Feature" of Windows Media Player That Just Has to Go...
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 07:00 AM
Excuse me while I rant. There's one "feature" in Windows Media Player that absolutely, positively sucks and creates the most nightmarish consumer scenarios imaginable. The "feature" in question? The copyright protection scheme inflicted upon consumers when they try to play video files through a secondary video source. I believe this was implemented to protect the all-important movie studios, but there has to be a better way. I have two good examples of how this causes frustration.
The first is when I was setting up a computer a couple of years ago at the church I attend. It had a dual-VGA out Matrox video card, and I envisioned being able to play DVDs on our huge wall screens from the PC. It was set up in such a fashion that the primary monitor was the local display, and the secondary monitor was the signal that was routed through the black box that sent the signal up to the projector. Imagine my surprise, and outright anger, when I realized that Windows Media Player 9 would only display a black box on the secondary monitor. DVDs? Forget about it. I think there are software DVD players on the market that will display on a secondary monitor source, but we ended up just purchasing a stand-alone DVD player and bypassing the computer entirely because it was so troublesome.
Oh The Agony...
The second scenario is more recent, and has more sting. I spent five hours helping a friend of my wife's with a school project - ripping short clips from DVDs, encoding them to Windows Media Video files (WMV), and embedding the clips inside a PowerPoint presentation. It was a painstaking process (the software I was using to rip had inaccurate time markers, so we had to "rip wide" and do another post-edit pass), but once I was finished it worked perfectly: we had large 640 x 480 video clips embedded in the PowerPoint, and as soon as the slide loaded they'd start to play. Beautiful!
I wasn't there when she started her presentation, but it was on a laptop connected to a project, and both the laptop and projector screen were active at the same time. Guess what happened? The video would only play on the laptop screen, and showed up black on the video projector screen. :?: If was there, I would have tried to toggle the laptop into a projector-only mode, but I'm not sure that would have worked. Can you imagine the frustration level she must have experienced in seeing the video on the laptop screen, but nothing on the projector screen? What possible explanation can there be for creating such a broken scenario?
So what's the deal here?
Is this a copyright punishment "feature" like I think it is, or is this a technical limitation? I haven't tried these scenarios with Windows Media Player 10 beta, but I have a hunch nothing has changed. But boy, does it ever need to change - things like this should just work. What you see on one screen you should see on the other screen, no exceptions.
UPDATE: I'm not one of those people who's afraid to admit when he was wrong, because I believe you can learn from every mistake. And oh boy, was I ever wrong on this one. 8O It turns out that the limitations I'm ranting about are related to the video drivers being unable to drive multiple instances of the overlaid video. My apologies to Microsoft for assuming it was their problem - guess I should have done some more research before ranting. Now about those goofy video drivers that need improvement... :twisted:
The first is when I was setting up a computer a couple of years ago at the church I attend. It had a dual-VGA out Matrox video card, and I envisioned being able to play DVDs on our huge wall screens from the PC. It was set up in such a fashion that the primary monitor was the local display, and the secondary monitor was the signal that was routed through the black box that sent the signal up to the projector. Imagine my surprise, and outright anger, when I realized that Windows Media Player 9 would only display a black box on the secondary monitor. DVDs? Forget about it. I think there are software DVD players on the market that will display on a secondary monitor source, but we ended up just purchasing a stand-alone DVD player and bypassing the computer entirely because it was so troublesome.
Oh The Agony...
The second scenario is more recent, and has more sting. I spent five hours helping a friend of my wife's with a school project - ripping short clips from DVDs, encoding them to Windows Media Video files (WMV), and embedding the clips inside a PowerPoint presentation. It was a painstaking process (the software I was using to rip had inaccurate time markers, so we had to "rip wide" and do another post-edit pass), but once I was finished it worked perfectly: we had large 640 x 480 video clips embedded in the PowerPoint, and as soon as the slide loaded they'd start to play. Beautiful!
I wasn't there when she started her presentation, but it was on a laptop connected to a project, and both the laptop and projector screen were active at the same time. Guess what happened? The video would only play on the laptop screen, and showed up black on the video projector screen. :?: If was there, I would have tried to toggle the laptop into a projector-only mode, but I'm not sure that would have worked. Can you imagine the frustration level she must have experienced in seeing the video on the laptop screen, but nothing on the projector screen? What possible explanation can there be for creating such a broken scenario?
So what's the deal here?
Is this a copyright punishment "feature" like I think it is, or is this a technical limitation? I haven't tried these scenarios with Windows Media Player 10 beta, but I have a hunch nothing has changed. But boy, does it ever need to change - things like this should just work. What you see on one screen you should see on the other screen, no exceptions.
UPDATE: I'm not one of those people who's afraid to admit when he was wrong, because I believe you can learn from every mistake. And oh boy, was I ever wrong on this one. 8O It turns out that the limitations I'm ranting about are related to the video drivers being unable to drive multiple instances of the overlaid video. My apologies to Microsoft for assuming it was their problem - guess I should have done some more research before ranting. Now about those goofy video drivers that need improvement... :twisted:
