Customer Reviews

Microsoft® Windows Media(TM) Player for Windows® XP Handbook (Cpg-Other)

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In the age of the information highway it is simply amazing how audio and video had taken forever to come to the desktop of computers. Microsoft Windows includes a Media player to allow you to hear and see these clips and this book will show you what you can do to make the experience better.

One of the things you can do with media player is build you own library of sound and clips and in this book, divided into 3 parts you learn the ins and outs of Microsoft latest creation. In part 1 this is where you'll install and configure the player, find out how it all works and begin to choose skins.

Also in part 1 you'll learn what files you can use with the player, how to downloading audio and video and how to use the player with portable devices. In part 2 you'll have a whole section on the creation, design, uses and customizing skins to work with the media player.

As if that wasn't enough part3 delves into the more advanced topics of using media player with web pages and customizing the media content. The cd includes the media player as well as the SDK, with a tutorial. Also a skins construction kit complete with ready to use skins.

For those into the multimedia side of Windows 98 and Windows ME, this is certainly a must have.

I am constantly amazed at the Glacial pace people put out books. Media Player has been out for a while (6 years), and yet, this is the only useful book there is. We found it useful in some regards, but nothing really delves into the development of applications and custom apps for the media player. If anyone else has found something that can help, PLEASE let me know!
If you are working with custom Media Player apps, you must have this book. It's not overly useful, but it IS the only thing there is.

I purchased a copy of windows Media player 7 Handbook thinking that I could figure out how to play a video on a web page. The book had several examples showing you different ways to play video in a web page, but gave no explanation on how to do that. I thought examples might be on the CD/ROM that was included and I guessed wrong. In fact after review I found that the examples in the book were cut and pasted out of the Windows Media Player 7 SDK which can be downloaded for free from microsoft.com. I purchased this to supplement the SDK documentation and found that the SDK documentation is actually better. If you have a fast modem, download the SDK and save the money on this book.

The only thing that looks good is making a skin for the media player and if you are only interested in that then this book may be a good choice.

In the world of computers and software, one year is old. This book was at least three-years old thus it was not up to date!!