My Vista Decoder utility and UAP/UAC
Vista has this great feature formerly known as User Account Protection (UAP) and now known as User Account Control (UAC) which is designed to protect you from malicious code. Because of my issues with Activation (see post below) I have this turned off so I had forgotten when I wrote my decoder app about a little thing called virtualization.
Now UAC doesn't think its a good idea to let nasty apps write into the Local machine area of the registry (very wisely) and therefore has a clever trick that when they do it redirects that write to another virtual area of the registry. Basically this means that legacy applications do not fail when they write and read the Local machine area of the registry but they don't actually update the local machine setting.
The decoder settings are in the Local machine area of the registry so, suprise suprise, if UAC is turned on you will find my decoder utility doesn't actually do much.
So the bottom line is, for now, you will have to temporarily turn off UAP/UAC using msconfig (details in an earlier post) prior to using the decoder utility to get it to work.
21 comments:
Does Run As Administrator work?
It should do. I've tried it on the 5472 build and it seems to update the correct things.
Hi Garry,
Thanks for your utility it worked on one of my problems which was no sound during DVD playback. Switch to Nvidia and it worked great.
I suspect that this is because i have the sound output for my MCE connected to an AMP via SPDIF.
I was wondering if you could help me with my second issue, i've no sound via Live TV.
I have been looking through the registry keys to see if i could find something along the same lines as preferred codec. I see the Nvivda icon appear in the system tray at the start of Live TV but no sound.
Any help would be appreicated.
Thanks
John
PS. I see you live near me, i'm based in Northampton!!
Hi John
Odd one that. The Registry entry for DVD and Live TV in MCE are exactly the same and they use the same codecs.
Have you tied opening the Nvidia Icon when playing live tv to see if you have a sound tab and if it is correctly setup?
Also I did come across a strange issue with sound not playing properly full screen but playing ok windowed which turned out to be a memory issue with the video driver. Going back to an older driver solved this for me.
Finally do you have a vista compatible driver for your sound card?
Sorry to bother you but I am running vista ultimate x64 the latest beta from microsoft. I have had the same problem as everyone else with the decoder not working I downloaded both powerdvd and the trial nvidia decoder but when I run your mce utility only microsoft decoder is in list. I diabled uap as stated in your article and I have installed everything as an administrator but I still have no luck PLease please please help.
Good day,
I have just spent the last 10 hours trying to fix the same problem.
I installed Vista Ultimate RC1, and The Nvidia Codec, however, no matter how I tweak the Reg. It still only shows the Microsoft diasabled MPEG codec.
I can't use the MC which worked before the expiry of the Microsoft codec.
The PreferredMPEG srring appears 4 times in the registry, but Nvidia didn't actually update the reg.
I ran a couple of tests to prove that to myself, and nothing.
Any ideas?
Hi Garry,
I switched to beta blogger but the music is not playing..it seems there is a missing plugin but i have no idea which plugin it is referring to.
Please help.
lqvxi cant get the utility to work with rc1 either. installed nvida decoder and my power dvd and it dosent see any of them. Please help me too.LOL
WHAT A PILE OF SHIT HEAD BRAIN TWISTING CRAP THIS IS LOOK I HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING NVIDIA, YOUR UTI. AND DISABLING THE UAP/UAC. THATS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU RUN CRASY APPS IN BETA, I AM SCRAPING THIS BETA GOING BACK TOO A SOLIDE XP PRO AND GOING TOO SPEND MY MONEY ON MORE PRODUCTIVE THIS LIKE A VIDEO CARD FOR MY ALIENWARE, THANKS FOR YOUR HELP ANYWAYS.
I'm running Ultimate and did not need to turn off UAC, but I did need to run the utility as a normal admin. I double checked that the change took place by searching for the friendly name of the CLSID.
Also, the latest PowerDVD gives you 3 choices in your utility now. The regular DVD decoder, an HD/BD decoder for HD-DVD/Blu-ray and a 3rd for some sort of home server function. I'm wondering if you need to make another utility to select which is the preferred HD decoder, that is, if MS even included one in Vista...
Any one know what the steps are to play mp4's on vista media center x64?
I can't seem to run the utility. I have tried turning UAC off and run as admin but all I get is a .net security message:
App atttempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy. To grant permission use the .net configuration tool. etc etc
If I click continue, the utility runs but no decoders are available.
Any ideas?
David
Make sure you save the file to a local disk and don't try to run it directly from the download site. Also don't download it to a temporary directory.
Hi Garry,
Thanks for writing this utility. I've been trying to play a DivX 6 avi file in VMC; I've installed the DivX 6 codec and it runs fine in WMP11, but for some reason Media Center just won't play it. I guess it doesn't recognise more than one type of video, and that video is still set to the microsoft codec.
I've run your utility (as administrator), but it only shows the microsoft codec (even though the divx codec must be on the system for WMP to be using it!)
Do you have any suggestions for this? Is there somewhere in the registry where I can find the name of the divx codec and try that out as the default codec name for media center?
Thank you again for all your help,
Victoria
I downloaded the vista codecs. I have no sound playing videos from windows picture gallery. Haven't checked you tube or anything yet. Any help? Todd
Todd,
Are you getting sound elsewhere in windows?
Do you know which codec your video uses?
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