Vista Week: Day 6

At last, the final day of Vista week. Today I'm going to tell you about my experiences with Vista multimedia, then I'll give you my conclusions about the Vista OS.

First on our list is DVD playback. I've heard rumors that if you have Vista Business Edition, you can't watch DVD's without installing some sort of DVD software. Not sure about this one, because I have DVD software installed from the OEM on my laptop. Corel's WinDVD comes in handy when watching DVD's, but on one of my previous laptops, it would crash in Vista. Fortunately, that is not an issue on my current laptop. Early on, I noticed that Vista used to cause periodic black screen occurances during movies. In other words, I would be watching a movie, then for a split second, my entire screen would go black before returning to the movie. Audio would continue to play, and the movie never stopped playback during this issue. I never figured out what this was exactly, but my initial thought was that it had something to do with Vista DRM schemes. Fortunately, I don't seem to have this issue anymore. WinDVD will upscale DVD's to 1080p/60 (assuming your computer supports doing so via graphics card / monitor resolution), making it very useful as a DVD player. Also, WinDVD now plays Blu-Ray discs! Of course, you need a blu-ray drive to make use of this functionality, which I don't have or need.

If you watch multimedia on your machine that you've retrieved from the internet (Don't want to know how), Windows Media Player is useful, but only to a certain degree. If you're watching a video clip of previews of the latest shows out of Japan, for example, fansubbers like to throw these video's in all sorts of weird container formats that you may not be familiar with. We all know about .avi's and .wmv's and whatnot, but have you ever heard of .mkv ? How about .ogg? Not only that, but there are codecs involved with containers or formats. What do you know about the H.264 codec? If you check out high definition movie previews through Apple, you'll probably learn that they compress their high definition previews in H.264. When it comes to codec / format hassles, I like Zoom Player. Zoom Player is available as freeware, and will help you with installing any kind of plugin or codec that is needed to play a given video / audio file. From the common to the mundane, Zoom Player probably knows what you need to play it. There is a paid-for version of the software that allows playback of DVDs.

Since I've already mentioned Winamp 5, I won't go into detail what it does. When it comes to multimedia (specifically music) on Vista though, this program is key. Additionally, if you are an Apple nut, you'll probably want to grab iTunes. Be warned though, iTunes on Vista has been problematic for many users, some of whom claimed that after installing the latest iTunes and plugging in their ipods, Vista would blue screen. More than likely this issue has been fixed, but aware that issues could arise.

Another interesting ability of Vista Ultimate is it's media extender functionality with the Xbox 360. With Ultimate, you are able to stream videos to your 360 from your PC. This can also be done with music, for use in such a case where your home theatre speakers are more powerful than your PC speakers. The set back is that this can be relatively difficult to set up, if you're not aware of what you're doing. Some video formats will not be compatible with the Xbox, but they can be transcoded on the fly through a program called Transcode 360. Even with this program though, some formats like .mkv will perform horribly when streamed. Additionally, firewalls can get in the way, as well as anti-virus software. Finally, sometimes the service will just not want to work. If you really want this feature but don't want Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Media Center edition has this functionality as well.

Overall Ratings:

Multimedia playback - 7/10; Vista certainly has some nice features in multimedia playback, and the ability to use Ultimate as a multimedia box for your Xbox is a great idea, but it gets bogged down by other flaws. Weird playback issues with some platforms (black screens, for example) can ruin the experience.
Extender functionality - 8/10; Awesome idea, but one that is still in its infancy. If more support for different formats is added, it has the potential to be one of the greatest revolutions for digital media usage I've ever seen. Unfortunately, due to the legality of including such formats in their software, I doubt it'll happen. Keep your fingers crossed!


Vista's Final rating:

216/280 or 7.7/10

Am I surprised? Not really, no. Vista's bad reputation was largely due to the fact that companies responsible for writing device hardware drivers aren't staying on top of the game. Of course, these manufacturers place the blame on the operating system vendor. Then again, it is equally Microsoft's fault for having shipped an operating system they were highly aware would have issues. Overall though, I think the operating system is pretty usable. If you bought an OEM machine and it has Vista on it, I don't think you should feel the need to downgrade to Windows XP. It's important to remember that not all OEMs will continue supporting users who clear out the original OS that shipped with the machine. Not only that, but you have no guarantee that your OEM hardware will work on XP (No reason why it shouldn't, but are you willing to take the risk?).

So am I going to switch over to Vista now? No, not at all. I do intend to keep it around though, as it has proven it has its uses. It does have some critically appealing features, some of which that we've only just begun to discover (No thanks to Microsoft's wonderfully useful documentation). Despite all of Vista's new features though, I will continue to remain a Linux advocate, and give credit where credit is due.

For the next blog post, some of you have asked about Windows Server 2008. We'll take a look at what makes Windows Server 2008 one of the biggest changes in Windows operating systems since Microsoft ditched DOS!