Chapter 14
Microsoft makes several digital media and power user tools available for free from its Web site, and its collection of Microsoft Windows XP–compatible tools is particularly compelling. In this chapter, we look at a few of them, including the following:
Digital media tools in the PowerToys suite for Windows XP A set of power user tools, including several that are geared toward digital media tasks.
Windows Media Encoder 7.1 A graphical user interface (GUI) for encoding and transcoding (degrading) digital audio and video into formats suitable for Internet streaming.
Windows Media Encoding Utility 8 A command-line utility for compressing audio and video files into Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video 8 formats.
Microsoft Producer A powerful stand-alone application that integrates with Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 and builds on the features in Windows Movie Maker, allowing you to create Web-based presentations. We focus on the the video capture, editing, and distribution options here, however.
