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Microsoft Has Broken Millions Of Webcams With Windows 10 Anniversary Update (thurrott.com)

Posted by msmash on from the windows-10 dept.

The Anniversary Update which Microsoft rolled out to Windows 10 users earlier this month has broken millions of webcams, the company said on Friday. The problem is that after installing the update, the company added, Windows no longer allows USB webcams to use MJPEG or H264 encoding processes, and only supports YUY2 encoding. Microsoft says it introduced the changes to prevent an issue that was resulting in duplication of encoding the stream (poor performance). If you're facing the issue, there's a workaround (via Thurrott.com): Rafael has figured out a workaround that should hopefully stop the freezing issue; if you are comfortable tweaking the registry, make this change. HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform, add DWORD "EnableFrameServerMode" and set to 0

11 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. It's the OS that just keeps on giving by HumanWiki · · Score: 5, Funny

    Headaches.

    1. Re:It's the OS that just keeps on giving by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1, Funny

      Linux is safer from spyware because it's a lottery whether it supports your wifi card or not. OS X is good but you can't buy a $500 Macbook

    2. Re:It's the OS that just keeps on giving by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      lololol here's a joke about linux having shit hardware support on an article about windows pulling support for millions of webcams

    3. Re:It's the OS that just keeps on giving by TroII · · Score: 5, Funny

      Linux: Free as in speech.
      BSD: Free as in beer.
      Windows 10: Free as in herpes.

      --
      "If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
  2. Title should read: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Microsoft Has Broken Millions of Computers With Windows 10 Anniversary Update"...

  3. Thank you for standing up to EVIL PATENTS MS! by CajunArson · · Score: 2, Funny

    H.264? There are evil patents associated with that right?

    This just sounds like Microsoft is trying to act like a positive in the freedom dimension Linux distro by refusing to support that evil patenty thing and by refusing to support webcams, which we all know could be used as NSA backdoors and are therefore evil.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  4. Now Only NSA Can Use Your Webcam by zenlessyank · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fun for everyone!!! Well, except you.

  5. NSA by Macdude · · Score: 3, Funny

    The real reason, it was interfering with the NSA backdoor that watches you sleep.

    --
    "Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
  6. Re:Microsoft broke my scanner once... by CannonballHead · · Score: 4, Funny

    Install Linux, no drivers needed to be installed

    Because the USB device didn't even get recognized at all? ;)

  7. systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    At least Windows 10 doesn't have systemd yet.

    (It's probably coming).

  8. My Win10 horror story by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Funny

    Older versions of Windows have a "Favorites" sub-menu on the left side of File Explorer. When I had to convert to Windows 10 at work, the "Favorites" links were automatically migrated into something called the "Quick Access" (QA) menu. So far so good: it converted old stuff into its new convention.

    However, "Favorites" used alias names, similar to naming a Windows Shortcut. But QA doesn't (at least not by default). Instead, QA uses the last actual folder name in the path as the displayed title.

    I thought QA simply rudely renamed my Favorites titles, so I right-clicked on them to "fix" the titles. Turns out I wasn't looking at an alias, but the live folder name.

    The result is I inadvertently renamed network folders used by hundreds of employees! Of course trouble-tickets started popping up like pop-corn. I put two and two together, and quickly renamed them back, and then went for a walk to dry off the sweat.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.