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Microsoft Has Broken Millions Of Webcams With Windows 10 Anniversary Update (thurrott.com)
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
Thursday I did an emergency install of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS on an old DELL laptop because Windows 10 suddenly couldn't manage to light up the built-in screen anymore.
I see. Because squirting 720p or 1080p video as uncompressed YUYV over a USB2 link never results in performance problems...
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
My wife's new notebook lost Miracast capability with the 8/12/16 Windows Security update. Miracast worked fine out of the box for several months, suddenly stopped for no apparent reason, checked update logs, 8/12/16 was the latest, unapplied it, Miracast is back. Windows 10 Home - no (easy) options to suppress automatic updates. Hurray for progress. They killed the Atom based Netbook / Nettop generation of PCs with updates to XP, too.
They fixed a performance issue by taking away a feature that millions of people use.
If I did that at my job, I'd probably be fired.
Windows 10 Home - no (easy) options to suppress automatic updates.
I haven't seen an update since I disabled the "Windows Update" service and set its "Action on failure" property to "No action". (note: not sure of the exact wording regarding action on failure, but you'll see it if you go to Computer Management, select Services, scroll down to Windows Update, right-click and select Properties; I believe it's in the right-most tab.)
There was no performance issue - the problem was that multiple applications could not access the camera at once, and it was important to fix this.
Quoting:
" It was important for us to enable concurrent camera access, so Windows Hello, Microsoft Hololens and other products and features could reliably assume that the camera would be available at any given time, regardless of what other applications may be accessing it. "
https://social.msdn.microsoft....
Which is of great comfort to the owners of medical imagers that are now junk unless someone catches and rolls back the anniversary edition. There is claimed to be a fix in the pipe.
Another reason why Windows is not ready for the desktop.
Grandma runs desktop Linux just fine.
This is rather insightful. I may be a Linux fan but there was a time when I would have readily admitted Grandma would have an easier time with Windows than with Linux (assuming someone competently preinstalled one or the other for her use). This surely started to change with the unusability of Windows 8 and now, with all the Windows 10 issues, I would not like to be on the receiving end of Grandma's support calls.
My wife (who is a grandma, by the way) uses a Linux distro that I installed and maintain for her (maintenance means installing updates once in a while). She neither knows nor cares that it's Linux and not Windows. It "just works" for her rather basic needs, and if she some day requires more advanced features, they're all available.