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