Chad Gibson's Weblog

Windows Digital Media Madness

What else do you typically do? (While playing digital media on your Windows PC)

The initial post over at Channel9 started some great feedback on Windows digital media.  I'd like to ask the first of (hopefully many) questions about how people typically consume digital media on their PCs.

This first question is, what other applications are you typically running while you are playing back audio or video? 

For example, do you typically have a media player minimized in the background playing music while you check your email, surf the internet, or do other things? 

Do you ever play video in the background or in a small window why you are accomplishing various tasks?  I'd love to hear this type of information about your usage patterns while playing back audio or video. 

Even better, if there are other specific applications or tasks that typically cause problems with your playback experiences.  Let's hear those too.

 

 

Published Thursday, May 20, 2004 12:39 PM by ccgibson

Comments

 

Sam said:

I usually play some music while working on other stuff. Right now I run:
ESRI ArcExplorer, Firefox, MS Visual Studio.NET, Outlook Express, cmd.exe, remote desktop client, internet explorer, FixFoto and the windows picture and fax viewer
May 20, 2004 12:46 PM
 

Shannon J Hager said:

While listening to audio (and sometimes watching video), I am almost always doing something else as well. Currently listening to a playlist and have the following open:
Outlook 2k3, MSN Messenger, OneNote, SharpReader, IE, SnippetCompiler, VS.NET2k3, MS SQL QA, MS SQL Ent Man.

Other commonly open-while listening/watching programs: Dreamweaver MX 2k4, Notepad, Firefox, Freecell.
May 20, 2004 1:03 PM
 

Scott Williams said:

I generally have something playing in the background throughout the workday. Generally I'll have IE, SharpReader, Outlook, VS.Net, Photoshop, SQL Server, and several explorer windows too. I rarely play a video as that is too distracting for me.
May 20, 2004 1:13 PM
 

Robert W. McLaws said:

I think it's really cool that, in a multi-monitor situation, that the second screen becomes a fullscreen video player. Infortunately, there are several webpages (MSN Video, for example) that continue to hijack the screen after the video is done playing.
May 20, 2004 3:07 PM
 

xx said:

It would be great to have a codec manager to selectively enable, disable, view and report on active/inactive codecs installed for WMP. I have many experimental codecs like DivX or XVID that sometimes crashes Explorer.exe and wish for a way to selectively disable them without uninstalling.

That brings another thing, there should some way to isolate the codecs so if they cause a crash it should not take down explorer.exe or WMP.
May 20, 2004 4:52 PM
 

Stevan Veselinovic said:

Mostly i run Visual Studio.NET, which, as you know, depending on the project size, is a memory hoger.
Maybe running WMP on a different process of the 'computer' would increase its performance by a bit, a standalone application is what I'am getting at here.
May 20, 2004 6:26 PM
 

Erik Charlebois said:

I listen to music while working on other things and therefore want the music app as unintrusive as possible. I currently use winamp shown in tray only, with its tray icon set to always hide, and then use hotkeys to control it without a GUI.
May 20, 2004 7:49 PM
 

Scott Duffy said:

My home computer has dual monitors. I sometimes watch video full-screen in one monitor while trying to do work (Outlook, Word, VS .NET) in the other.

My main question is this: since WMP is NOT the active window (since I'm working in another program at the same time) it never properly goes full screen. The WMP tools (stop, ffwd, volume, etc.) are visible at all times. I find that annoying, since the video shrinks a little bit to accomodate the toolbar so I see less.

In a multi-monitor situation, how do you get the WMP to hide the tools even though WMP is not the active window?

I hope that is clear. If not, I can try to reexplain it.
May 20, 2004 10:05 PM
 

chad said:

Thanks for all of the additional comments. Honestly, this laundry list of tasks does roughly mirror my expectations. But the information that I was hoping to get did not really seem to come out:

Lets talk about music. When you all fire up some media player, play some music, and then minimize that to the background -- do you get a lot of audio "glitches"? Or does that set-up work pretty well for you?
May 20, 2004 11:17 PM
 

ChuckBuc said:

I was surprised to read that some here are deving and playing music in the background. I’ve had a full system lock up a few times while using WMP and having a few sessions of the VS 2003 IDE up. I never really took the time to see what was causing but I don’t play WMP during coding sessions because if this experience; but I wrote this off on the IDE not playing well with others. Normal office document creations and web browsing I haven’t really had a problem with.
May 21, 2004 1:09 AM
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