Thursday, May 3, 2007
Microsoft Releases Windows Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista, Lacks DVR-MS Support
Posted by Jason Dunn in "SOFTWARE" @ 11:45 AM
"Hi, I’m Bret Ahlstrom. I’m a program manager on the Digital Memories team at Microsoft. Most recently, I was in charge of Movie Maker 2.6, which is available for download here. If the Vista version of Movie Maker is working for you, you’re all set, please don’t install Movie Maker 2.6. Some machines with certain graphics cards (cards that don’t support the Windows Device Driver Model) are unable to run Vista Movie Maker at all. Movie Maker 2.6 was developed specifically to ensure that those machines could run a version of Movie Maker. No other bug fixes or feature enhancements were included in this release."
This isn't one of those "download and install just because it's new" scenarios - but for those of us who got bitten by this problem, it's great news...kind of (keep reading). Basically, the version of Windows Movie Maker that ships with Vista relied on the video card supporting the Windows Device Driver Model - but if you had a laptop that didn't support that (like my Fujitsu P7010D) when you tried to start Windows Movie Maker you were presented with an error message that said "Windows Movie Maker cannot start because your video card does not support the required level of hardware acceleration or hardware acceleration is not available". Understandably, this was frustrating - a powerful video card shouldn't be required for editing an MPEG file.
I was excited to install the application on my Fujitsu laptop, but when I tried opening a DVR-MS file (the one type of file I routinely want to edit), I was presented with this error message:
I was baffled as to why this new version of Windows Movie Maker lacked support for DVR-MS files: Windows Vista Ultimate includes an MPEG2 decoder, so that's installed on the laptop, and if I had to I could connect a TV tuner to this laptop and record DVR-MS files using Media Center. Ultimately this 2.6 version is just Windows XP SP2's Movie Maker, so it lacks DVR-MS support.
That's a big let-down and I'm very disappointed to see Microsoft release a piece of software that still lacks support for DVR-MS files. It's their file format, and it's an embarrassment that their own software program can't open it.
This isn't one of those "download and install just because it's new" scenarios - but for those of us who got bitten by this problem, it's great news...kind of (keep reading). Basically, the version of Windows Movie Maker that ships with Vista relied on the video card supporting the Windows Device Driver Model - but if you had a laptop that didn't support that (like my Fujitsu P7010D) when you tried to start Windows Movie Maker you were presented with an error message that said "Windows Movie Maker cannot start because your video card does not support the required level of hardware acceleration or hardware acceleration is not available". Understandably, this was frustrating - a powerful video card shouldn't be required for editing an MPEG file.
I was excited to install the application on my Fujitsu laptop, but when I tried opening a DVR-MS file (the one type of file I routinely want to edit), I was presented with this error message:
I was baffled as to why this new version of Windows Movie Maker lacked support for DVR-MS files: Windows Vista Ultimate includes an MPEG2 decoder, so that's installed on the laptop, and if I had to I could connect a TV tuner to this laptop and record DVR-MS files using Media Center. Ultimately this 2.6 version is just Windows XP SP2's Movie Maker, so it lacks DVR-MS support.
That's a big let-down and I'm very disappointed to see Microsoft release a piece of software that still lacks support for DVR-MS files. It's their file format, and it's an embarrassment that their own software program can't open it.
