Review- Movielink

I closed the Manager from the Help menu, choosing the option to "Restart Movielink Manager."  This apparently worked since my selection now showed the Play Movie button in a cool blue tone instead of grey.  Clicking the Play button opened the movie inside of the Movielink player window instead of a separate Windows Media Player window.  It also reminded me that if I started watching the movie now I would have 24 hours to complete it. 

The video quality was quite nice (I believe this was an EQ or enhanced quality video with DVD quality resolution).  The player could be enlarged to fill the full screen, but the control bar at the bottom would not hide.  This is a definite no-no for use on my HTPC.  The last thing I want is a distraction reminding me that this is a computer program.  I decided to try viewing the file directly from Windows Media Player since its controls hide automatically.  As a side note, closing the Movielink player took several seconds.  Luckily the file played inside WMP when I double-clicked it.  This is encouraging since my HTPC software, Meedio, relies on WMP and can play any files that play in WMP.  So, to test this out, I added a library item to my development install of Meedio on my laptop to see if the movie would play inside of Meedio.

No go.  The item showed up of course, but when I selected play the screen turned black momentarily then quit.  I imagine that I could make it work using the WMP plugin available for Meedio but that is for another time.  I would like test the file playback from BeyondTV – which also has heavy ties to WMP – but this would involve moving the file (can’t do that) or mapping a drive from the HTPC to my laptop.  That’s a lot of work to play a file on my TV set.

Wrap up… 

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