Entries for MarkPerris

Yahoo Messenger for WPF still in the pipeline? [Yahoo Messenger for WPF still in the pipeline?]

MarkPerris — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:15:25 GMT

This was one of the flagship WPF projects, a mass market desktop app that really leveraged technologies in the .NET framwork.

With the owner of the design company (i think) moving to Adobe, does anyone know the current state of the project?

in reply to Yahoo Messenger for WPF still in the pipeline?

Silverlight Rendering Speed vs WPF [Silverlight Rendering Speed vs WPF]

MarkPerris — Sat, 12 May 2007 21:19:14 GMT

I have to say, i'm seriously impressed with the speed of the software rendering in Silverlight. I dont know whether it's the time based animations or coding, but it really flies on my P4 2ghz.

I'd be interested to know whether the renderer was the backend sliced out of the WPF software-only renderer, or whether it was developed specifically for the silverlight project.

However, one thing does concern me. It actually seems faster than hardware accellerated WPF. To put it simply, software rendering in Silverlight seems a lot smoother and more responsive than hardware rendering on my DX9-compatible Geforce 6200. I know the 6200 is hardly top end, but surely those few hundred million transistors should provide some benefit? Or is it just bogged down by the layers of .NET that have to be traversed to reach the 3D hardware itself?.

Don't get me wrong here, I truely believe WPF is an excellent platform, and is going to open up some seriously cool apps in a year or so, but slower than silverlight, in software?

in reply to Silverlight Rendering Speed vs WPF

Yahoo Messenger for Vista - WPF Goodness! [Yahoo Messenger for Vista - WPF Goodness!]

MarkPerris — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:18:40 GMT

Hello,

I haven't seen this posted here, so just thought I would drop you a link for some screenshots from the forthcoming Vista version of Yahoo Messenger. As you can see, it looks pretty gorgeous.

I think this is the first commerical WPF application, beating even Microsoft to it (if you exclude their WPF development environment, that is...)

http://thewpfblog.com/?p=76

in reply to Yahoo Messenger for Vista - WPF Goodness!

Activating Windows Vista & High Def Content (HDCP) [Activating Windows Vista & High Def Content (HDCP)]

MarkPerris — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:39:44 GMT

Hello All,

I wonder if anyone here can answer a few technical questions..

I'm going to purchase windows vista home premium for my home machine, and install it on my current desktop machine. In the future, I intend to upgrade it to a completely new system and re-install vista, will I be able to reactivate it on the new machine?

My partner is Japanese, and she is picking up a Vista from Japan on her next trip, will she be able to activate it successfully from the UK?

Now for something more technical

I want my future system to be able to play hi-def protected content, so I have worked out that to comply with all the requirements, i will need:

» Windows Vista (of course)
» A HDCP compliant video card *with the actual HDCP module on it*. It seems a lot of cards are advertised as "compatible", but very few actually have the hardware on the board...
» A HDCP compliant display
» And if i want to hear anything, a WLP3.0 compliant audio codec which supports content decryption, the only one I know of so far being the Realtek ALC 885. This one is really important because there are currently no add in cards which support audio content decyption and neither do there appear to be any on the horizon either, so i need to make sure that I get a motherboard with this onboard audio chipset.

Therefore, If anyone can think of any more, please let me know

Edit: oh, and of course, some kind of hd-dvd / blu-ray drive and deocder software

Also, i'm interested to know what people think will be the winning HD format in future. Yeah, i know this has been asked many times, but does anyone else see the Blu-Ray in the East and HD-DVD in the West split coming? I have a feeling this battle will be decided by the consoles, not by the standalone players, none of which seem to be very good at the moment (1 minute power on times!?).
The PS3 is likely to be big in Japan, hence, Blu-Ray, and the Xbox360 / Vista combo in the West will make HD-DVD the winner.

Regards,

Mark

in reply to Activating Windows Vista & High Def Content (HDCP)

How much of WPF is hardware accellerated? [How much of WPF is hardware accellerated?]

MarkPerris — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 12:54:58 GMT

I've been trying out the WinFX betas, and have been very impressed with all the effects made available by WPF. I've also experimented with the nvidia drivers to see what a difference having DX9 hardware has to the speed of WPF content rendering. In software mode, it's pretty slow, but on hardware, its extremely fast, and this is with a GF FX5200.

My question is, really one out of pure interest..

Which parts of WPF are acellerated by DX9 hardware?
The only info i have is that DX10 (WGF 2.0) will put the whole text rendering pipeline into hardware.

in reply to How much of WPF is hardware accellerated?

Hardware Monitoring in Vista [Hardware Monitoring in Vista]

MarkPerris — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:11:13 GMT

I remember reading somewhere that Vista would support hardware monitoring, and would be able to predict, to some extent, hard disk failures and so on (presumably via S.M.A.R.T.)

Does anyone have any more information about this?

in reply to Hardware Monitoring in Vista

Strange Hardware Collection... [Strange Hardware Collection...]

MarkPerris — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 17:41:53 GMT

As a random and very geeky idea in my coffee time, anyone know any really weird (but useful!) PCI/AGP/ISA hardware?

I have found the following so far:

A PCI (yes, not PCI-E) based Geforce 6200
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product.asp?id=15

An AGP to PCI adapter (only works on NEC PC98 systems due to IRQ conflicts(!))
http://akiba.ascii24.com/akiba/news/2002/06/01/636205-000.html

4 Commodore 64 Sound Chips mounted on a PCI board
http://www.hardsid.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2

in reply to Strange Hardware Collection...

MTV URGE Music Service and Lossless WMA Audio? if only... [MTV URGE Music Service and Lossless WMA Audio? if only...]

MarkPerris — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 16:14:15 GMT

Since MS really seems to be pushing this hi-fi music experience for Vista, wouldn't it naturally follow that the music on URGE (the new MTV/WMP11 service) should be in at least Lossless WMA9 or, even better, for new music, considering the whole Intel HD Audio push and UAA thing, 24bit/96khz? I really don't hope that anyone pushing serious audio quality would deliver a lossy compressed format, considering how much HD space a typical 'Vista' machine would likely have.

Living out here in Japan, i have already paid for (300 yen) and downloaded at least 5 lossless WMA9 Pro 24bit 96Khz music files, which sound utterly stunning even on my built in Intel 945 audio (which is 24/96 capable), from the 'ongen' service.

So, any clues as to what the format will be?

in reply to MTV URGE Music Service and Lossless WMA Audio? if only...

Video Request - Windows Media Player Team [Video Request - Windows Media Player Team]

MarkPerris — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 07:03:05 GMT

With the CES2006 show coming up very soon, are there any plans to interview the media player team?

I would be interested to know what is happening on the side of video/audio playback on Vista.

Thanks!

in reply to Video Request - Windows Media Player Team

.Net 2.0 and x86-64 technology performance [.Net 2.0 and x86-64 technology performance]

MarkPerris — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 05:38:36 GMT

Does anyone know if the x86-64 edition of the .net framework 2.0 takes advantage of the extra functionality provided by 64bit extended processors when doing JIT compilation of the MSIL code?

I'm especially thinking about extra GP registers, and to some extent larger address space.
If so, then some .net apps, and especially the WinFX platform and Vista as a whole, could see performance improvements on 64 bit chips.

Or is it simply the same as the 32 bit version, but 64bit compatible?

in reply to .Net 2.0 and x86-64 technology performance

Macromedia Flash, Vectors, Avalon, and the next IE [Macromedia Flash, Vectors, Avalon, and the next IE]

MarkPerris — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 03:35:50 GMT

Since Avalon is going to provide hardware accelleration for its vector-based interface, it will be interesting to see if Macromedia (or Microsoft, in fact), would support native rendering of macromedia flash documents in a web page in Avalon.

Complicated flash documents render and animate slowly, even on a fast computer, forcing most developers leave the FPS limiter at 15fps for CPU consumption reasons. Hence, flash judders along most of the time, rather like early web streaming video. It seems to me, it would be the perfect vector based app, nothing else with so much accessible vector content comes to mind.

Is Microsoft thinking about this possibility, or, i wonder, is Macromedia?. The only problem i can forsee is one of security.

in reply to Macromedia Flash, Vectors, Avalon, and the next IE

Cleartype with Japanese fonts, will it finally work in Avalon Text? [Cleartype with Japanese fonts, will it finally work in Avalon Text?]

MarkPerris — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 04:21:37 GMT

Hello All,

I am a user of a Japanese edition of Windows XP (I live in Japan), and as those others who have used Japanese XP will probrobly have noticed, cleartype is almost non-functional in these builds.

The Japanese font in XP, (By Xerox Corp), is a huge collection containing not only all the kanji, japanese scripts, extended Shift-JIS and EUC character sets, but also the western roman text fonts too. Since, as i mentioned above, cleartype fails on this font containing the entire western & asian sets, as does any other form of anti-aliasing, it essentially means that any font rendering in Japanese XP is horribly aliased.

This frustrated me for a very long time, being the owner of an LCD laptop. So, i decided to make my own version of the Kanji fonts (MsGothic and MSMincho) that would have cleartype enabled, after following the instructions from a Japanese friend and a bit of intuition.

For those of you wishing to do this, here are the steps from the top of my head, you will need to download the command line font handling utilities from MS's Typography site for it to work.

1. First, extract the font from the windows\fonts folder.
2. Split the TTC collection into its TTF files.
3. For each TTF file, strip out the bitmap font data which is used for rendering at the most common sizes.

This is the key to getting Cleartype working, it forces the system to render as glyphs right down to the smallest size

4. For each TTF file, edit the headers to change the name, subtype, and postscript definition for each header entry (Windows, Mac, and again in Japanese). This gives it a new name and ID so it can be installed alongside the original. You can do this with a batch file as its a long task.

5. Rebuild the TTF's back into the original TTC collection, and install it.

I cannot provide the edited font as it is copyright, but this procedure should be perfectly legal for windows owners who already have the bits needed.

Here are the results, both before and after, (Captured on an English Language XP with the new Kanji font installed)

Cleartype On - Edited Font http://www.geocities.com/darkangelxx2001/ClearTypeOn.png

Cleartype On - Unedited Font
http://www.geocities.com/darkangelxx2001/ClearTypeOff.png

Hopefully you can see the difference, and also perhaps why it was disabled from the start. The bold, or complex kanji characters almost become black splots. This is probrobly because not only was the font not originally designed with cleartype in mind, but also cleatrype only seems to work in the horizontal axis, not the vertical. So while horizonal features are nicely smoothed, vertical ones are not, and that is kinda of essential for asian text systems.

So, the big question now is, will cleartype
a: be improved into both horizontal and vertical directions for Avalon Text *and* enabled on Japanese fonts? or...
b: will a new Kanji font be provided, if, even with H&V Cleartype, the Xerox-produced font is still unreadable?

This might not be the place to say, but i must say i was something disappointed to see cleartype advertised in XP Japanese, and yet have it fail miserably to work. Surely system builders in Japan must have brought this up with the Text engineers at MS? Out here in the land of Fasionable PC's, everything is LCD, and all the text all looks equally bad.

Thanks for reading,

Mark

in reply to Cleartype with Japanese fonts, will it finally work in Avalon Text?