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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

6 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. 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. Thanks, developers! So agile! Much evergreen! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No, seriously, thanks, developers. For always being "evergreen," for deciding that end users should no longer have the right to accept or refuse individual "upgrades," and for always being agile.

    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?

    1. Re:Thanks, developers! So agile! Much evergreen! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The nasty trick in this case is that they shouldn't have had to test against a zillion awful webcams to know that they had a problem.

      The USB Video Class Spec and Microsoft's own driver for it defines support for both uncompressed and compressed video output; and for programs to negotiate with a UVC device to change video parameters.

      The extra abstraction layer they added between the driver and the applications only supports one uncompressed format; and breaks if you try to negotiate for something different. That's not a weirdo edge case with somebody's ghastly rev. A product that never should have made it out the door; that's "break a substantial portion of a spec we used to support and hope everything turns out for the best". Not good.