A colleague needed to know how to turn on captions in Windows Media Player. I started to write her a note about it, but needed to check how to get to the setting in the Windows Media 11, since the last time I had to turn captions on on my own system was a version or two back. I'm usually looking at embedded web video, rather than in the player. After 10 minutes of intensive searching for the location of the setting, I felt like I had been exposed once more to the insane mind of Microsoft.

Here's a snapshot of the the player (see below). Note, there is no "File" menu, no Open command, nothing that appears useful unless you are purchasing music from their store or ripping from an old CD. Really, now, "Rip" and "Burn" are so 2006!

The file I wanted to play is an ASX file which contains a reference to her video and her SAMI caption file. As I said, there is no "Open" command visible in the interface, so I gave up on opening the file from within the player and right-clicked the ASX file on my desktop, then selected "Open with..." > "Windows Media Player." You can see the file open in the player below, but captions are off at this point.

Next I knew from experience I needed to find a setting "Show Captions." It used to be pretty easy to locate, but not anymore. After some fruitless attempts to find any menu option that looked like it might be related to captions, I opened the Help menu, and searched for "Captions". This came up