Sometimes, you'll open a media file in InqScribe and discover that some of the playback controls are disabled. What's up with that?
Individual playback buttons will enable or disable themselves based on the underlying capabilities of the media player and attributes of the media source. For example, if you connect to a real-time network stream, the rewind button will be disabled because you can't rewind a real-time stream.
When InqScribe opens a media file, it waits until the file is open, and then asks the underlying media engine (QuickTime or Windows Media Player) what specific playback capabilities it has. Based on the response, it enables or disables various controls.
So if you notice that the Fast Forward button is disabled, that's because the media engine has reported that it doesn't support Fast Forward for the current media format.
Generally, this is not an issue with QuickTime (except for URL-based media). QuickTime is pretty good about letting you play back anything and various speeds.
Windows Media Player is a bit different. WMP does really well with Windows Media-based formats: .wmv, .wma, and .asf. When you are working with non-Microsoft formats, though, WMP often reports limited playback support. Usually you won't be able to adjust the play rate, and sometimes Fast Forward and Rewind are disabled. We don't know if this is a technical issue or an attempt to get users to migrate to Windows Media-based formats. But our standard suggestion is to download QuickTime and use it as your default media player, since it handles many formats more capably than WMP.
A common situation in which disabled remote control buttons appear occurs on Windows computers. If you set Windows Media Player to be your preferred media player, you may find that when WMP opens non-Windows Media content (such as .mp3 or .avi files), some buttons are disabled. This reflects the fact that WMP provided limited support for non-Windows Media formats. This is one reason we recommend using QuickTime as your preferred media player.