Tutorials - Windows.qxd 11/21/03 3:07 PM Page W-32

TUTORIAL 12 PLAYING A CD OR DVD MOVIE

Windows Media Player is a music and video player that comes free with Windows XP. It will play a wide variety of music and video clip types, including the popular MP3, WMA, WAV, MOV, and AVI formats.

Windows Media Player does not support certain MPEG-type video clips, but you can buy a codec (a piece of software that acts as a converter) that will allow it to do so. See the Help system in Windows Media Player for pointers to third-party add-ons.

Play an Audio CD To play an audio CD, simply insert it in the computer’s CD drive. It should start playing immediately. If it does not play for some reason, use Windows Media Player to start it.

Steps To start an audio CD with Windows Media Player:

1. Choose Start, All Programs, Windows Media Player. 2. Choose Play, CD Audio and then click the icon for the drive containing the audio CD. As the CD plays, you can click the Now Playing button to display a graphic that moves in response to the music. The Now Playing screen also shows a track list. From this screen you can:

• Move a track up or down in the track list. Right-click it and choose Move Up or Move Down. • Skip certain tracks. Select the track(s) to skip, then right- click the selection and choose Disable Selected Track(s). • Pause or stop the player. Use the buttons at the bottom of the window. They work just like buttons on a cassette tape player or stereo CD player.

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Play a DVD Movie Most computers that come with a DVD drive also come with extra software that works with that drive to play DVD movies. One popular brand is WinDVD. Such software is usually more full-featured than Windows Media Player, so you may prefer to use it if available. However, in the absence of a third-party DVD movie player utility, Windows Media Player will serve.

Steps To play a DVD movie in Windows Media Player:

1. Insert the DVD movie in the drive. It may start playing automatically, or you may see a window like this:

2. If you see the above window, click OK to play the movie in Windows Media Player. If you see a message that Windows Media Player cannot play the movie, click the More Details hyperlink in the mes- sage box to find out why. You might not have an MPEG decoder installed on your PC. This can either be a hardware board or a software utility, and it usually comes with the DVD drive. Its purpose is to decode and decompress the movie data and display it on your monitor.

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