TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter pays attention to Windows Media 9 and consumer electronics (CE) devices. It also covers Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2003, I saw the first commercial DVD players capable of playing WM9 video files burned on blank DVD discs. Clearly this is a breakthrough for desktop video producers who want to skip third-party DVD authoring yet still deliver high-quality, full-screen performance on a TV or home theatre system. As noted in other chapters, a useful analogy is the ability of a CD audio device to play Windows Media Audio (or MP3 files) from a CD-ROM just as easily as that device might play a standard Red Book audio CD.
Microsoft has been working with leading CE companies such as Panasonic, Equator, and Polaroid (among others in a fast-growing list) to enable WM9 video playback on consumer DVD systems, and the results are finally available. For the record, Windows Media 9 Audio is also supported in this PC-to-home-entertainment migration and is, in fact, ahead of WM9 Video in terms of implementation by major consumer electronics companies. I'll cover this in more detail later on page 306.
I'd like to say that Microsoft has a master plan for integrating WM9 with CE in...
