playing media directly from SD card

[mattrees]

Hi all

I have pre-ordered and looking forward to Friday (glad the slippage in shipping turned out to be a false alarm).

One question I have is whether it will be possible to play media DIRECTLY from the SD card or whether you have to transfer the media from the card to the hard drive in order to play it. Does anyone know?

In all the advertising it talks about 'use the SD card to add or remove media' which makes it sound like you can only use the micro SD to transfer stuff not to truly expand the memory capacity.

Obviously this is a big deal in terms of memory capacity and I wondered whether anyone had any thoughts or knew the answer?

cheers

 

[SnailUK]

If you can't use the content of the sd cards, then they are useless.

Being that you can't put apps and their data on smart cards with wp8, you'll need an sd card for multimedia.

 

[mattrees]

Agreed...bit what I mean is this : will you have to transfer the media from the SD card to the hard drive before you're able to play it? Or can you play you play it straight from the memory card?

In other words, is the SD card just for transferring media on and off the hard drive?

 

[VagrantWade]

Agreed...bit what I mean is this : will you have to transfer the media from the SD card to the hard drive before you're able to play it? Or can you play you play it straight from the memory card?

In other words, is the SD card just for transferring media on and off the hard drive?

You can play media directly off the SD card. The only issue is that if you want the files as part of the Windows library, you have to create a folder and map it to the SD card because it will not allow external devices to be added to the Library.

 

[jhoff80]

You can play media directly from the microSD card in Windows 8, so it should be the same in Windows RT. (MAYBE you'd have an issue with high bitrate 1080p video or something, but I kind of doubt that).

The only issue is that you can't add removable flash memory to your Windows library. So, it's not going to show in the Music, Photos, or Video apps as part of your library of content. However, you have two options. You can either go to the desktop, and double click on whatever you want to view/play. That's the first option, but obviously, on a tablet it's not preferable.

The second option is that you can use the app bar command (in the Video and Music apps, at least) to "Open File." You then use the file picker to browse to whatever you want to play, can select the songs or videos you want to hear, and then hit open, and it'll play.

Neither of these options is as good as it showing in the library from default, but it still works.

The difference is huge though.

vs

 

[mattrees]

Thanks everyone! Really helpful.