Windows Vista WAVE - Windows Audio Video Excellence | Charles

LightRider
I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad

Near the end, Robert asks if there is any special hardware needed for the machine, and the answer is no. Then there's the caveat that the whole system has to be Vista logo'd. Would that be a contradiction?

SteveBall
SteveBall

Good question - this is not a contradiction, not precisely.

There is nothing "special" about the hardware in a machine that gets the logo except that it has been tested. The logo tests are the only real mechanism we have to set a minimum quality bar for end to end experiences.

If you throw a random piece of hardware with a mis-behaving driver into a logoed Windows Vista machine, then all bets are off for glitch-resilience.

This new infrastructure delivers better AV performance when there is CPU, GPU, and memory resource contention, but it does not perform miracles on random machines with random hardware configurations.

* * *

Cyonix
Me

LightRider wrote:
Near the end, Robert asks if there is any special hardware needed for the machine, and the answer is no. Then there's the caveat that the whole system has to be Vista logo'd. Would that be a contradiction?

What he was saying was: if you have 2 good computers (vista logo computer or a computer built in 2006) and you install Vista on one and XP on the other, Vista wont glitch where XP will.

mycroft

Very nice video, how come it was delayed so long?

The user rights focus was interesting and not something I expected the video to cover. Nice honest answers, looks like a passionate team.

Does this system require any new APIs to take advantage of? What I mean is, is it only WMP that will support this out of the box or will all programs immediately benefit? Is this magic happening at the DXVA layer to determine what threads are audio/video related? If that's the case apps such as Quicktime won't immediately support this?

What happens if multiple video threads are started, not that that would be a particularly useful scenario, I'm just curious. Would things then start to glitch or does it refuse to render them entirely? This Quality of Service kind of thing is something that doesn't sound like an immediate killer feature, but once you actually start using it in the real world it becomes indisposable. Has there been any new work in Vista regarding QoS for media streaming over networks? My system doesn't behave nicely when downloading or using P2P, but I suppose that's partially a router issue.

Great work guys

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Nice work guys!!

RobertScoble
Just another geek

mycroft: the video was held for a few reasons. 1) I was overloaded and just let it sit around too long. 2) DRM is controversial so this is one of the few videos I asked the PR team to look at before it was published, that slowed it down. 3) It was about Vista, so it get sent to their marketing team, who had to consider it too. 4) I quit my job in that time, so wasn't pushing videos through as hard.

In all of this, it was 89% my incompetence. Sorry about that. It's still a good video, though, and I'm glad it got out.

notuptome

it is ok that that is why it was a delayed shown video. but now that it is out i would say it is dang cool man what a differance. now robert i know you did alot of videos but what was your WOW factor like after ya stopped the camra , did you like keep talking in shock at the differances or what cause i know i would have wanted more he he

DigitalDud

Ughh way too much DRM talk. Way to put a lot of poor developers on the spot, Robert. I would have liked to hear more about the whole "quality audio/video playback" thing. You showed how it handles playing during high CPU demands but what about disk or network. Say you're copying tons of files and playing a video. Or your wireless signal isn't strong enough.

And what happens if there simply isn't enough resources on the system to play back the video full speed? Does it skip frames or reduce quality?

Also is there any API to tap into this multimedia scheduling thing. Can I have my game say, I'm a multimedia application please guarantee I run at high frame rates? Or, I require 4 mbps on the disk/network to play back this video.

efortier

Very nice video, Robert. Thanks!

I do agree that there wasn't nearly enough details on what makes the whole glitch resilience work, but it was still nice.

How about that neat stressing tool? Is it available anywhere? I could really use that while testing some of my apps. It is a MS tools or maybe available in the SDK? I couldn't find mention of it.

Eric