Figure 9-35: Using Add to my music to copy music from the Store to your PC
Xbox Music Pass has other advantages, but the point here is that with this service, the Xbox Music Store is suddenly open to you in ways that it isn’t otherwise. You can find out more about the service at www.xbox.com/music.
Of course, even finding music to buy can be difficult. And while the navigational facilities in the Xbox Music Store are, at best, basic, your best bet is to search for the music you want. And in this one case, Xbox Music Store actually works really well (assuming you know what you want, of course), thanks to its integration with the system-wide Windows 8 search functionality.
Search works as it does throughout Windows 8, and you can trigger a search of the store from within Xbox Music or at any time from elsewhere in the OS. To do so, display the Search charm (Winkey + Q) and, if you’re not already using Xbox Music, be sure to select Music from the apps list in the search pane.
Then start typing in a search term, perhaps an artist, album, or song name, and the Search experience will often supply suggestions as you type. You can see an example of this in Figure 9-36, and search results appear right in the Xbox Music app, giving you a way to dig deeper into your favorite music.
Figure 9-36: Searching in Xbox Music
While the Music + Videos app on Windows Phone fully supports podcasts, the Xbox Music app in Windows 8/RT doesn’t, so there’s no way to find, subscribe to, or listen to/view podcasts. Instead, you’ll need to try a third-party app. One that’s emerged as an early favorite is SlapDash Podcasts, which you can find in Windows Store.
Doing More with Music
While the Music app provides a handy, consumption-only interface for music, those who have more advanced needs will need to turn to some classic Windows applications that have been kicking around for several years.
Note, however, that neither of these options are available to Windows RT users: Only Windows 8 provides any support for these legacy desktop-based music applications.
All versions of Windows 8 include Windows Media Player, which is shown in Figure 9-37. This application has historically been used as a media management system, but it hasn’t really changed since Windows 7, for better or worse.
Figure 9-37: Windows Media Player
Windows Media Center, meanwhile, started life as a consumption-only application, like today’s Metro-style apps, though it picked up more sophisticated capabilities over time. It features large, touch-friendly controls, works well in full-screen mode, and has a particularly nice Now Playing interface, which is shown in Figure 9-38.
Unfortunately, finding Media Center is a bit problematic.
First, Media Center is not available on Windows RT or the base version of Windows 8, which is called Windows 8 Core. Instead, you must have Windows 8 Pro before you can get Media Center.
Second, even if you have Windows 8 Pro, Media Center isn’t free: You can buy it for a small fee from Microsoft using the new Add Features to Windows interface. (You can easily find this through Start Search.) Why bother? If you have to ask, you don’t want Media Center. And frankly, the world has moved on anyway.
Figure 9-38: The full-screen Media Center music playback experience
Buying, Managing, and Playing Movies and TV Shows
The Windows 8 video experience revolves around a new Metro-style app, called Xbox Video, and some traditional Windows applications—Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center for playback and Movie Maker for video editing and sharing—which carry over from Windows 7.
The Xbox Video app is a bit more limited than that, actually. It can’t play DVD- or Blu-ray-based movies either.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that the video experience is similar to that of music: The Metro-style Xbox Video app works well enough for video playback on tablets, other portable devices, and PCs, and for browsing Microsoft’s new Xbox Video Store online, but doesn’t offer any advanced features. If you want to do more with videos, like edit your own home movies and share them via online services like Facebook or YouTube, you’ll need to stick with the more productive desktop environment and those more mature Windows applications.
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.