Microsoft has half-learned a very important lesson from users of the Windows Vista operating systems; enough with the damn User Account Control prompts already! While Windows 7 still has some UAC prompts on by default (surely can be disabled like with Vista) they will be cut down by about 29 percent, which still leaves a whole lot of annoying prompts.
“From our beta and internal testing, we expect a 29% decrease in UAC prompts compared to Windows Vista,” Paul Cooke, Microsoft Corp.’s director of Windows 7 client enterprise security, said last week. The UAC prompts are intended to prevent malware infections by asking the user to confirm program executions before they can take place.
Unfortunately, with Windows Vista even the most patient user was suffering from “click fatigue,” according to an internal Microsoft study. While scaling back is always welcome, it’s probably fair to say that users who can, will disable the prompts altogether for the good of their mental health.
In other Windows 7 news, Windows Media Player 12 ships with the Release Candidate of the operating system, and will include codec support for many popular formats out of the box. Users reportedly won’t have to install an XviD codec to decode XviD video, and won’t need a separate splitter installed for MP4 content. Apple QuickTime files also reportedly play with the software without any additional installations.
Result for: mp4
An Israeli company, High Definition Israel or HDi, has introduced couple of interesting Blu-ray players. In addition to playing Blu-ray movies, the players support MKV and DivX files as well as BitTorrent downloads.
HDi has two product families, Dune HD Center and Dune BD Prime, both with four models for different network connection and external hard drive setups. With Dune BD Prime you can choose between the base model, one with WiFi 802.11n, one with Gigabit ethernet, and one with two eSATA ports. In addition to the same upgrade options the more expensive Dune HD Centers feature a rack for internal SATA drives as well.
All of the players have BD Live support, 1GB of internal flash memory, BD/DVD/CD playback, three USB ports for external USB drives, support for NFS and Samba file sharing as well as support for IPTV and Internet radio.
HDi’s players have also extensive file support, including support for AVI, MKV (Matroska), M2TS, TS, MOV, MP4 and WMV files.
MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, XVID, WMV9, VC1 and H.264/AVC video codecs and AC3 (Dolby Digital), EAC3 (Dolby Digital+), DTS, MPEG 1/2/3, AAC, LPCM, WMA, WMAPro, Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio audio codecs are supported as well. Dune BD Prime players are able to display both SSA/ASS and SRT subtitles.
The players feature HDMI and component outputs that are able to pass 1080p resolution video. Audio outputs include digital Toslink and RCA and analogue 7.1 RCA.
To make it even more impressive, all the HDi Blu-ray players also feature a BitTorrent client and a Gecko-based web browser.
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Result for: mp4
We have updated several guides that deal with the multimedia capabilities of Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii consoles. The updates include guides for streaming content through a network to Xbox 360 or Wii, creating MP4 files for Xbox 360 or PS3, creating AVCHD for PS3 & Blu-ray players and using online TV sharing programs with Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii console.
