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.
Using 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.
• Play on Xbox 360: In this scenario, you can hand off the playback of Store-based content from your PC to your Xbox 360, over the same home network only. That is, the content you play
Accessing Store Content
Most people who use the Xbox Video app aren’t going to have large video collections they’ve ripped from optical media. Instead, and in keeping with the modern design of the Metro environment in which it runs, Xbox Video operates as a front end for Microsoft’s Store back end, in this case with the TV and Movie Stores in particular.
You’re probably familiar with how such stores work thanks to previous experience with Apple iTunes and other e-commerce destinations. But Microsoft’s online efforts, perhaps not surprisingly, offer some advantages.
First, the basics. Microsoft offers both TV shows and movies for purchase, and movies for rent. Some of this content is available in a choice of standard definition (SD) or high-definition (HD) formats, where the latter is more expensive but looks better on higher resolution screens. Videos rented or purchased from Microsoft work with the Xbox Video app, Windows Media Player, and Media Center in Windows 8/RT, with the Xbox 360, and on Windows
