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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
Headaches.
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.
"Microsoft Has Broken Millions of Computers With Windows 10 Anniversary Update"...
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.
I mean, I get it. I get that you don't want to support more than one platform or configuration at any given moment in time. It's not fun having to regression test against a billion third-party devices, and it's not cool to QA things that work fine on your machine - and in a DevOps world, you don't have to - but please, find someone in your office with a little grey in his beard, and ask them, just once, about writing software with the user's needs in mind, not just your manager's desire to cut support costs.
It wasn't that long ago that software that worked, continued to work until the end user broke it by changing something. Now the users aren't breaking things -- but you are. Why?
Would it seriously be too much to ask if, in exchange for no longer being able to receive technical support (because technically, a working configuration that isn't "the newest version" is unsupported in this brave new world Nadella's created for us), users be permitted to not change already-working configurations?
I see. Because squirting 720p or 1080p video as uncompressed YUYV over a USB2 link never results in performance problems...
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Fun for everyone!!! Well, except you.
So I had plenty of issues after Anniversary edition update. Sound issues, choppy scrolling again in Chrome. Finicky touchpad with jitter and freeze. I finally decided it was time to try a Linux distro. Yes, I have had plenty of issues with Linux distro's in the past. But this time not a one, and besides that my scanner that didn't work in Windows 10 now works in Ubuntu. Sorry but I think having to endure more problems every six months or so on yet another Windows 10 roll out is just too much.
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
Install Linux, no drivers needed to be installed
Because the USB device didn't even get recognized at all? ;)
And then he got sued by Parker Brothers.
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.
It was an old Memorex USB flatbed scanner. Windows wouldn't allow the old drivers and there were no new drivers, and driver compatibility mode or whatever it's called still wouldn't allow the drivers. No problem plugging anything into Linux. I haven't looked back since.
Because the USB device didn't even get recognized at all? ;)
So you jest but compliant USB Video Class devices (read: webcams) have been supported since 2008. It's actually a standard much like you plug in any USB keyboard, mouse, pendrive etc. and it usually works. It's quite amazing that Microsoft managed to break such a widely adopted standard. I'm guess they're just setting the standard for what "supported lifetime" you'll have before Windows 10 refuses to run.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
I'm actually surprised no one sued them yet for the whole Windows 10 fiasco. Especially in the manufacturing world where a lot of machines are running some version of Windows for their HMI, and a lot of them had the Windows 10 upgrade popup (Bypassing every little trick to prevent from going to desktop) and a lot of operators clicked yes on it. It's pretty neat seeing multimillion dollar machines go down left and right. The last one I've seen go down was a Makino CNC machine at a machine shop. The best one was a multi million dollar bottling line go down.
There has been a lot of downtime because of this and that's a lot of money.
He bought that account. A few years back a lot of the low UID account holders sold their accounts off. For some reason people bought them!
The basic problem was that the developers at Microsoft don't understand who uses their OS and why. They had 5 use cases when they were developing their new feature, but forgot about the 50,000 use cases that already exist, unknown to the development staff.
"We changed an API's behavior because of this new feature that nobody cares about, which broke almost every imaging device attached to the OS" reeks of poor engineering management.
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.
And this is why cumulative, mandatory, updates are a BAD THING.
It's like they're not even trying now to hide it anymore. They have pretty much openly declared themselves to be hostile to users with a lot of forced updates that benefit not the user but themselves. But MS fanboys will still lap it up and somehow say it's a good thing.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You'd think that Microsoft would be able to query it's installed base via whatever Win10 was collecting and figure out how people were using a feature. Either they can't, or nobody thought of it.