Windows Windows 8 Marmite thread... Because you either love it or hate it

Correct, which means if you use a decent media player like vlc which has all the codecs built into its engine, you don't have think about codecs any longer, not like the old days before vlc when you had to hunt down codecs for certain files, like I said codecs are so last century ....if your using vlc that is.

 

They sell the XBox at a loss, and make the money back from the games and charging devs silly money to patch their games, from my understanding about $40k per patch.

 

They've shelved that...

 

True, but my impression is that XBox is an oddball in Microsoft's business. It primarily saw itself as an enterprise software business (which is why it left Zune to die like a neglected orphan). It is moving to 'devices and services', but it still does not seem to quite get the idea what that means. It wants to be like Apple, selling premium products at a premium price, but hasn't realised yet that you have to earn that reputation of selling premium products before you can charge premium prices.

Google clearly sees itself primarily as a services company, so it just pushes the Nexus 7 hardware out at cost --to Google it is just a means to an end, another investment in the service ecosystem just like e.g. Google Maps or YouTube.

 

Yea that's basically what I was hoping they were going to do. Though like everyone else, I highly doubt it'll happen.

I thought VLC still had issues playing Real Media? A brief look at it's list of and I can see a cross and a couple of partials, so no it doesn't play everything. It does play a lot though, though throwing the 1st MKV I find at it and it returns an error about needing to rebuild the index. Same file in WMP with Klite and MPCHC works with no issue. Maybe we still need a few things from last century?

If you've never had an issue with VLC that's great, I've had a few and that's why I use MPCHC

 

I've got around 23,000 music files. And for me I need a lot more control over them than just sorting between artist and title. Sorting by album, and date released are common ways I view my collection (but I'm sure VLC can do that as well). I also find it useful to view albums including their covers, as that's often a quicker way to identify a specific album than reading their names. I'm also a big fan of album-art, many bands take their time to produce something interesting, and I enjoy viewing them.

I think it's also important to have powerful playlist support. Take Zune for example, I can create auto playlists dependent on a variety of different parameters. I use this to create a playlist that has all of my favourited songs, which updates automatically, which I can then easily sync to my phone to listen on the go.

It's not difficult though. Installing something like Shark 007's codec pack is a doddle, and it configures everything for you.

 

that is odd, because I have rm files which it plays just fine

I bet it still plays though after that message(which is easily disabled in settings), the reason for those messages in vlc is because its a technical bit of software & it's making you aware of potential issues within the media file, something that other player don't do. It's less an issue & more a feature.

In the ten years I'v been using vlc I have yet to come across a single media file it couldn't play. mpc is also a great little player, but it struggles with large libraries & doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features & settings as vlc ...personally I use both for different things.

 

Greetings!

It ends on the 20th.

Yes and yes.

 

Yes, but that is only a recent thing. If i remember correctly it only happen this April.

 

I've got a grand total of 6 rm files, 2 of which crashed VLC, seem to work fine in MPCHC, though they are old files. The MKV rebuilt it's index and then worked, but considering the others worked without needing to VLC shouldn't need to either. Either way, lets stop dragging this thread off topic

 

Good thing too. I don't know who came up with the asinine idea of charging developers the price of a luxury car to fix or improve a game that is sold through Microsoft's channels, but that's all Microsoft. Good engineering products ruined by greedy business suits.

 

It is very odd that you seem to have so much trouble with vlc

If you bother to read my previous reply on this, it doesn't have to, it is a feature which can be easily disabled if you don't like it.

Once again with feeling:

 

Le sigh

 

all i can say my experience of win 8 is not a sweet one, why has an operating system devolved into that mess.

I have rigs with win 7 running no issues, even still an xp one, no issues, win 8 issue after issue.

even win 98se was better than that, i had that running for years and no issues.

I was having to do a restore on a brand new lappy , because it decided to restart (yes this is all turned off in options) in the middle of lol and ****ing configure window features, then hang for half an hour thrashing the hd drive, when finished, kb stopped working, blurays don't always play, games don't always work, well that is if you can get them to load.

yes i made sure this lappy was fully updated before i put anything on it, as in win updates, software updates for bluray player and such drivers.

yes i will be putting win 7 on it because i doubt it is a hardware issue

 

Every version of Windows, I read stories like this. Windows 7 included.
It's always a hardware problem.

 

Well the undelying core of Win 8 is essentially the same as in Win 7 so I'm not sure it's a Windows problem either.... several things could have happened from point A to Z, not so many of them some mysterious exclusive Win 8 problem.

Strangely enough, they teach you in A+ that a vast majority of computer related problems are not really computer related at all, but user related problems...

 

@ Tribble, try a refresh rather than system restore... if nothing else it'll remove all the shite the OEM has got it bogged down with...

In other news MS has updates it's OEM recommendations/requirements for 8/8.1 - source

For those to lazy to read it a quick overview:

If it has WiFi it must also support bluetooth
Anything with a built-in screen [tablet/all-in-one/laptop] must have a front-facing 720p [or better] webcam
Push towards better-quality speaker/mic [this combined with the one above is so they can push skype/lync iirc]
'Precision touchpads' [whatever that means] are a requirement on tablets, option on everything else
GPUs must have a WDDM 1.3 driver

8.1 also to support [or better support] SSD/HDD hybrid drives [Seagate Momentus XT et al.] and 802.11ac WiFi adaptors

 

MSI GT70 2OD-200UK 17.3" True HD LED, Intel i7-4700MQ, 16GB DDR3, 2x64GB SSD, 750GB HDD, GTX 780M 4GB, Blu-Ray - Windows 8 Laptop

shiny brand new hardware, in 16 years of building, i must of been real lucky cause hardware rarely fails when brand new, gpu's die and hd's sometimes for the most part they last a while.

I've never had any issues ever with xp or win 7 as an os.

for that lappy to behave has it does it would then have to be multi hardware failure and i would be very surprised if it was that, i do believe it is the win 8 os and it is buggy as hell.

 

never underestimate the lengths to which OEMs cut corners... i'd still put my blame on hardware or crappy OEM software/drivers...

 

Windows 8 runs fine on my old dual Opteron 250 with ATi Radeon 1650XT PC. We're talking old hardware here. Only bump was GPU driver --I had to use a Vista one, but it works just fine.

Must be the OEM drivers.