The Windows Phone 7 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 20, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Windows Phone 7
- Microsoft
- Mobile
Video Playback
The video playback integration isn’t quite as impressive as the Zune audio experience on Windows Phone solely because there’s no Zune Pass equivalent for video. That’s of course the holy grail that we’re waiting for everyone with their toes in video to solve, but there aren’t any takers as of yet.
Windows Phone 7 supports mp4, m4v and wmv video formats (m4a, wma for audio). You’ll notice that the list overlaps with what Apple specifies for the iPhone. That’s right, without transcoding you can playback all non-DRM video content that’s in an iPhone-friendly format.
Your videos are grouped into personal, TV, music, movies and a category for all of them. As is the case with most tabs inside Windows Phone 7, these ones make a lot of sense. Any tagged content you download from the Zune Marketplace or sync goes into the TV, music and movies categories, and anything you record with the phone goes under personal.
All purchases/rentals in the Zune Video Marketplace happen in Microsoft Points. You have to first buy Microsoft points, then you get to spend them on content. Hooray.
When purchasing a TV show or movie you are presented with the option to view it on your PC or Windows Phone. The Zune application will deliver the appropriate version of the content accordingly. Once you’ve made your decision though, there doesn’t appear to be a way to go back.
Video playback on Windows Phone is very simple. The video player app has three controls: rewind, pause/play and fast forward. You can’t move your finger around the timeline bar to scrub through the video. Tapping the the forward/back buttons skips around in 30 second increments, while holding them down rewinds/fast forwards.
There’s no support for zooming ultra wide content to fit the screen, everything must be viewed in the original aspect ratio. I don’t have a problem with this, but my dad might. I prefer content in its original aspect ratio, while my dad is one of those people who wants the screen full of useful pixels - not black bars.
Like most anything in the OS, you can pin videos to the Start screen by tapping and holding on any video then selecting pin to start.
The app is very fast (notice a trend?) and does a good job of organizing your content. The biggest issue with the video player app is you can’t purchase content within it. You have to sync all videos from your PC. And allow me to reiterate: a Zune Pass for video content would be a dream come true.
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Hrel - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
Am I the only one who sees that the "brown" option for the UI color is red? Am I losing my sight? My tv is adjusted perfectly to THX standards. All the other colors look right. Or is it just the camera you used to take the shot?Hrel - Saturday, December 4, 2010 - link
As far as I'm concerned any phone that doesn't have a "fine me" feature with the ability to lock it doesn't even exist. Seriously, why has it taken SOOO long to have this? It should be standard on all phones. Now I want to be able to make my phone the key for my car.Hrel - Sunday, December 5, 2010 - link
I'm the same as your dad. I mean I want to view everything is the proper aspect ratio; but I also REALLY want usefull pixels filling the whole screen. That's why I wish everything was just filmed in 16:9. I mean, that's plenty wide. When I want movies on DVD I just zoom in once so the whole screen is filled and with the exception of far right/left text in some movies I honestly don't miss out on anything. It doesn't cut off very much on the sides and really when you're filming who's gonna point the camera so where you're supposed to be looking is at the edge of view? No one. 16:9 is the only aspect ratio visual media should be in. That way everything is uniform and just fits.Hrel - Sunday, December 5, 2010 - link
ie no trade offsnatewaddoups - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
The article mentioned the confusing behavior of IE's back button... The confusion starts when you open IE from the start menu, because at that point IE throws away your browsing history, so that the back-button will return you to the start menu. It makes sense if you were opening IE to look at a new web page, but it's maddening if you were opening IE to resume a browsing session that had useful stuff in the web navigation history.The workaround is to switch to IE by holding down the back-button and selecting IE from the list of running apps. That opens IE without throwing away your browsing history, so that the back-button continues to work for web navigation.
I actually removed the IE tile from the start menu, just to prevent myself from accidentally throwing out the browser history. I've always got two or three tabs open in IE, with meaningful history in each tab, so it was always aggravating to press the back button and get kicked back to the start menu.
If you'd like to see this fixed in a future version of Windows Phone, please vote for it here:
http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-fe...