Congratulations! You've just upgraded your laptop with
the latest from Redmond (as in Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft), and
have finally figured out how to bypass most of the “purple charms” screen
stuff. You’ll still need it to open apps, but other than that, unless you’re
running a tablet, it’s cute, but not so functional – at least for lawyers, legal
professionals, and other business-minded people. Everything is peachy, up until
you try to play a deposition video or video DVD.
Now I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on things
regarding the intersection of law and technology. When I informed one of my
clients that we had a whole bunch of MPEG audio files (which were supposed to
be deposition videos), the panic alarm began to wail. What a horrible
discovery, as we scrambled to prepare for the next trial-of-the-century. When I
tried to play the files using the default Windows Media Player, I could hear
the audio, but there was no picture.
My client was able to “view” the video files using Windows
7. I assumed he was running some crazy rare CODECS (coder-decoders are used to
play various audio and video files), and that these videos had been produced by
someone with no clue as to standard video file formats.
I decided it was time to do a little research (I had
apparently missed the Microsoft Developer Network bulletin) to see if others were
having similar issues. After reading a few posts on the Microsoft site, I came
upon an article that spells it out pretty well, How to Play DVDs in Windows 8. Bottom line – unless you either upgrade to the Pro Pack ($99 from Microsoft) or
download another media player, you cannot play MPEG-2 video in Windows 8.
Fortunately, there are some decent alternatives, since at
$99 per Windows 8.1 laptop, I wasn’t too excited about the Pro Pack. I went
with the free (as in, “you’re not scraping another $100 per computer out of me
this time”) AVS Media Player, since I have used some of their video software for several years. It
works great, runs your MPEG-2 files just fine in TrialDirector, and disables
the panic alarm. Another option, mentioned in the article is VLC media player. I haven’t tried it,
but have found many positive comments about it.
If you’d prefer to stick with the Windows Media Player, you
will find instructions here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/feature-packs/
Hopefully, some will read this article before making their
own horrific discovery…