However, I find that libavcodec is not fast enough to decode high-bitrate h.264 content in real-time on my machine (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo) — say, for example, the h.264 content that you would find on a Blu-ray disc.  So, I set out looking for alternatives.

The most obvious choice is CoreAVC (although that will cost you $15!).  They boast having the fastest software h.264 decoder available — and they’re probably right.  I downloaded the trial version and found that it allowed my computer, for the first time, to play back a Blu-ray encoding without stuttering or hiccuping or dropping frames.  Unfortunately, my particular Blu-ray movie (Stargate: Continuum) apparently was encoded by some encoder that did not follow the AVC spec completely, and thus, CoreAVC has some decoding errors (although the video is decoded fine by libavcodec, if a bit too slowly).  I’ve been promised that a workaround for this issue will be present in CoreAVC 2.0, which may come along at around the same time as Windows 7′s general availability.

There’s also hardware-assisted decoding.  Maybe if you have a good GPU, this is an option.  On my machine, the GPU supports h.264 decoding, but it is even slower than libavcodec.

Another option is just to use Windows 7′s built-in h.264 support, that I had read about at some point, but completely slipped my mind until after I checked out CoreAVC.  So, here’s how to configure Media Player Classic to prefer Windows 7′s native support over that provided by FFDShow.

First, go to View -> Options.  Select “External Filters” on the left, and then click “Add Filter” in the top right.  Find “Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder” and click “OK.”

Now, select this filter in the list of filters, and choose the “Prefer” option on the right.

This filter will take over the playback of some other types of media as well.  If you don’t want that, remove everything except the h.264 subtype and the subtypes in {braces} from the list at the bottom of this window.

Press “OK,” and then close and restart Media Player Classic.  And then, enjoy your h.264.

(By the way, this is the h.264 encoding found on the Blu-ray disc, and it has not been re-encoded or re-compressed or anything.  I had to rip it because that’s the only way I could get it to play at all… but that’s another story.)

If you ever decide you want to undo this, just go back to the “External Filters” config and remove the Microsoft DTV-DVD filter from the list, and then restart Media Player Classic again.

I’ve found Windows 7′s native support to be faster than libavcodec, but slower than CoreAVC.  It also doesn’t have any of the decoding errors that I saw in CoreAVC.  It is almost fast enough to play the movie on my system, but I still notice some slight stuttering.  I’ll live with it until CoreAVC 2.0 is available, and then we’ll see how that stacks up.

I looked at many options for this.  The easiest solution seems like it would be to use an existing online photo sharing site, like Flickr or Windows Live Spaces.  I looked at four or five of these, and none of them really offered what I was looking for.  And what was that, exactly?

Access control. I want to be able to upload a bunch of photos for the general public to see, but have more that friends and family can log in to view. I want to be able to assign users into groups and set some photos visible only to certain groups.

Tagging. Some existing services have limited support for tagging. I really like Windows Photo Gallery’s hierarchical tagging. I wanted some way to bring this into my online photo gallery.

(Hold on, why don’t I just use Facebook? It seems to fit the bill so far. Well, how about these…)

Download the full-size, original photos. Users who have accounts should be able to download the full photo for archival or printing, not just a scaled-down web version. And I’d like the photos on the web site itself to also be reasonably high resolution… no 640×480 junk.

Easily managed appearance and organization of photos. Specifically, I want photos to be presented chronologically, and I don’t want to have to do some tedeous rearranging or even be sure to upload photos in the correct order to get them to appear in the order I want.

After dismissing the idea of using an existing online service, I thought about writing my own. I started working on my own online photo application. It was to support everything I mentioned above, and even support importing XMP metadata information saved by Windows Photo Gallery and expose the hierarchical tag tree for users to browse. I made some good progress on this application during the previous summer, but I ended up dropping it because I simply do not have the time to devote to it.

However, all of that effort was not lost. I finally settled on Gallery (what a name), an open-source PHP based photo gallery web app. I extended the metadata module provided with it to support reading XMP metadata from Windows Photo Gallery (tags, corrected dates, and captions), using code I had written for this that was originally intended to be used in my own photo application. This makes uploading photos that I have already organized in Windows Photo Gallery very easy for me. I made some other minor tweaks to the app, but now it is up and running at gallery.aaron-kelley.net.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to check out my photo gallery!

I decided not to expose tag information directly for privacy reasons. However, you can search on the tags. My tags are pretty detailed, so if you put in a location, person, or whatever in the search box, you may be able to find photos.

Personal photos (that is, photos of me, friends, family, and so on) are only visible to people who have an account and sign in. If you register for an account, it has to be verified by me before it becomes active. I will only allow friends and family to register accounts. People without accounts can still view my more “general” photos.

Account holders may also download the original version of any photo they have access to. Other web users may view the rather generously sized 1024×768 versions. (I thought about going even higher than that, but decided that it’d make the page bigger than some users’ web browser windows. I’ll check out the Google Analytics data on this after a while, and raise it if it looks like it won’t bug very many people.)

At this moment, I’ve only uploaded photos from the last two months. I will be adding more in the coming days and weeks, starting from now and going backwards. Photos marked “NEW” on the site are photos that I added within the last 7 days. (After I run out of digital photos, I hope to digitize some “traditional photos” and make them available. But I have lots of digital photos that I have yet to even sort through and tag for myself.)

I don’t have an HDTV or a set-top Blu-ray player. I do have a laptop with a full-HD display and a Blu-ray drive. That should be enough? However, software to play Blu-ray titles on Windows seems to be a bit lacking.

To be clear, this is the only Blu-ray disc that I have tried to play (the only one I have at the moment). It came with a leaflet that said that my player may need a firmware update for “optimal playback.”

First, I tried to play it in Nero Showtime (that came with Nero 8). I had purchased the HD-DVD/Blu-ray plug-in for Nero 8 that is supposed to, among other things, allow HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback in Nero Showtime. HD-DVD worked reasonably well, but when I tried to play this Blu-ray disc, it gave me a “you need to update your firmware” message and then would not play the movie (Nero Showtime just seemed to reset).

I checked on this with Nero support and they mentioned that lots of people are having problems playing newer Blu-ray releases that require this firmware update, but they offered no solution. Nero has since released Nero 9, which seems to have any option for HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback removed from Nero Showtime.

Alright, so I tried to play it in PowerDVD 8 after they released an update that is supposed to address this “firmware update” issue. It acts like it’s going to start playing the movie, and then it crashes with the standard Windows “this program stopped working” dialog box.

Today, I tried Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray. This program crashes when I launch it, even if I don’t have any DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray disc in the drive at all.

Is there any other Blu-ray playback software for Windows that I can try? I just want to watch my stupid movie. If you happen to read this and know of any, please drop me a line.

I love the idea of Blu-ray (or HD-DVD), which is pretty much, high quality high definition movies on a disc like a DVD. It is unreasonably more complicated than a DVD, both in terms of its implementation and in actually getting it to work. Maybe I could play older movies that came out before this firmware update business. What about consumers that have a set-top Blu-ray player for their HDTV? Do movie studios really expect all of them to be able to figure out how to hook their players up to the Internet and download the firmware update, or go through whatever other process is necessary to get a firmware update on the player, just to get new movies to play? I hope this all gets sorted out before Blu-ray takes off, and we don’t see a regular stream of required updates causing problems forever.

Windows Photo Gallery stores tag information directly in the files you are tagging, when possible. For instance, when tagging JPEG files, the tags are stored in the JPEGs using XMP. Also, if you modify other information about the files (such as the date/time a photo was taken), that information is stored in the file if possible.

In some cases, the information cannot be stored in the file itself; for instance, if the file is marked “read only,” or if the file format does not support metadata (PNG, AVI, etc.). In this case, Windows Photo Gallery still allows you to do anything you could to a file that it could store the information in, only, it stores the information in its own little private database. This is transparent to the user.

If you want to move your “gallery” to a different machine, and your gallery consists only of JPEG images, you can probably just copy them all to the new machine, and Windows Photo Gallery will automatically index them and rebuild its list of tags. However, if you have other types of files in your gallery, the information will not be carried along with these files and you’ll have to re-tag them. Ugh.

I’ve been looking into migrating the Windows Photo Gallery database. There doesn’t seem to be any supported way to do this (someone please correct me if I’m wrong).

The database itself is easy to find — it is the Pictures.pd4 file, found in AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery in your Windows profile folder. So, to migrate the database, it should be as simple as moving this file to the new machine, and making sure that the paths to all of the files in your gallery remain the same, right?

Well, after trying this and running Windows Photo Gallery, we come up with a curious dialog box.

Note that the folder it is complaining about is actually present on the machine.

Here, you have some options. If you click on “Find the folder,” and browse for it, you might end up with a duplicate of every file appearing in your gallery (and the folder is listed under “Folders” on the left twice, with no way to remove either of them). If you click on “Remove the folder,” all of the files in your gallery disappear, and your tag information is lost (even if you manually add the folder back). And if you click on “Cancel,” everything works great, all of the files appear and all of the tag information appears to have been migrated succesfully… Except, this dialog reappears every time you run Windows Photo Gallery.

In trying to figure out a way to either migrate the information without causing this dialog to appear, or to figure out why Windows Photo Gallery doesn’t seem to like the Pictures folder even though it has the same path as before, I set up two identical galleries on two separate machines and compared their Pictures.pd4 files. Skipping a lot of the details, I did eventually stumble on the key difference.

Windows Photo Gallery is checking your volume information (volume label and serial number) and storing it in its database; it is then using this to verify that the files are on the same drive that they were before. If you move the database to a different machine, the volume serial number is not the same, so it throws up the error we saw above. You can’t just edit the volume serial number in the Pictures.pd4 file to match the new one, though, Windows Photo Gallery is able to detect that the file has been tampered with (you’d have to go fix some other checksum stuff to get that to work). The easiest thing to do is just to change the volume serial number on your “destination” machine to match the one of the “source” machine. You can do that with this SysInternals utility, VolumeID.

So, migrating your Windows Photo Gallery database, step-by-step:

• Copy all of the files in your gallery to the new machine. Make sure the path to them remains the same as it was on the old machine.
• Copy the Pictures.pd4 file to the new machine.
• Change the volume ID of the C: drive (and any other drives with folders indexed by Windows Photo Gallery) on the new machine to be the same as on the old machine, using VolumeID. (Reboot for the changes to be visible, before running Windows Photo Gallery.)

Note that Windows Live Photo Gallery can be migrated similarly.

Searching around online, I was unable to quickly find any place to download the software, or any kind of support page for this device. In light of this, I made a .iso image of the CD that came with it and I am posting it here in case anyone needs it. Here is a picture of the device for comparison with your device (to know if this is the software you need):

Download version 2.3 of the software (1.92 MB, Windows and Mac OS X software included in the image).  This is an ISO image of the CD that came with the device, and needs to be mounted or burned to a CD for you to be able to access the software.

I’m a long-time user of Paint Shop Pro. Or rather, I was. I remember finding a trial version of Paint Shop Pro 3 on my dad’s Windows 3.x office computer back around 1996-7 (as a sixth grader), and I was just getting into Internet stuff around that time, and what I hadn’t found yet was a program that could manipulate and convert between many different image types, specifically those that are used by web browsers (GIF/JPEG). I mean, all I really knew about back then was Microsoft Paint. (Sheesh, was that really only ten years ago?)

Anyway, this particular trial program was one of those that lets you keep using it even if you are well beyond the trial period (“You are on day 498 of your 30 day trial…”). It was a fantastic program, so I just kept on using it. I moved to the trial version of Paint Shop Pro 4, but it really kicked me off after 60 days (30 day trial plus a 30 day grace period), so I continued to use beta versions and other trials, falling back to Paint Shop Pro 3 (with the really annoying 16-bit Windows 8.3 filename limit) when nothing else was available, until I actually got a full version of Paint Shop Pro 6 in 1999.

I continued to upgrade with each release over the years, and I was pretty happy with it for a while yet, but it seemed like the quality started to go down (slowly) starting around Paint Shop Pro 9 in 2004. This was even more apparent after Corel bought Jasc, and I had to jump ship with Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, which was, in my opinion, a disaster (at least at its first release).

The biggest complaint I had about PSPXI was its photo “Organizer” feature. I have a lot of pictures, and PSPXI took it upon itself at first launch to start crawling through them and generating thumbnails. It continued doing this even even if the organizer was hidden, and excluding folders for it to catalog in the options didn’t seem to stop it. This caused a lot of hard drive trashing and CPU usage which made my machine, let alone PSPXI itself, quite useless. Even after going through other measures to disable it, PSPXI would bounce around between, say, 2% and 8% CPU usage if I had the program open, with no images open, not doing anything with it. What is it doing with the CPU when there is nothing for it to be doing? I don’t have any other programs that behave like this, so I’m really sorry but I’m afraid that I’m going to have to call it poorly-written software. I was able to reproduce this on every machine that I installed the software on, and I brought this issue to Corel and never received any useful response.

Anyway, the main complaint of my article here is software bloat in general. To continue my example, what did I originally start using Paint Shop Pro for, and what am I looking for in an image editor? I’m not a graphics artist or anything, so I’d say something like…

• Basic image editing capabilities
• Image mark-up (drawing rectangles or arrows to highlight things)
• Conversion between different image types
• Cropping / resizing images
• Simple effects
• Support for gradients, alpha transparency, and layers is a plus

Paint Shop Pro used to be a program that satisfied this quite nicely, without being way above my budget (like Photoshop). But for some reason, Corel wanted to expand the capabilities of the program and make it a full photo catalog application like Picasa or Microsoft Digital Image Suite, and force it on my just because I use Paint Shop Pro. (Not to mention the fact that they didn’t do a very good job with it.) If they had kept it properly componetized (just give me the option to not install or properly disable the “organizer”) and not broken the software, then I might have continued buying upgrades for years to come, but alas, I found myself searching for an alternative.

Free software has come a long way, and after trying The GIMP and dumping it (it’s a nice application, but seriously, how come I can’t just draw a rectangle?), I ended up settling on Paint.NET, which is, I must say, quite fantastic since version 3.0 added the MDI (actually, TDI). Pretty must anything I did in Paint Shop Pro can be done in Paint.NET, it comes with a number of nice effects that allow even non-artistic people like me to come up with some cool-looking pictures, and it’s very simply laid out and easy to use (just had to learn a few new keyboard shortcuts), not to mention the fact that it is free and the source code is available. Also, I like to see that the software I use is actively being improved and developed further; Paint Shop Pro hasn’t changed very much in years, and the upgrades have become perhaps worth less than you have to pay for them.

Anyway, this is just one example of fantastic software going astray. There are several others that I have observed lately (for instance, Nero used to be a favorite of lots of people but there are many more complaints about it now; another example may be some of the “Norton” branded products from Symantec). I’m not sure what it is, because some big programs continue on gaining only new useful functionality and ease of use (Microsoft Office, Photoshop), and yet some try to be too big and throw new functionality at you without you asking for it (Paint Shop Pro photo organizer, Nero Scout). This seems to be what really separates professional software from software that is trying to be more than it should be, a “jack of all trades but a master of none” so to speak. And of course, only big companies like Corel can make this mistake and still go along fine.

Not that I expect this to really accomplish anything, but to continue yelling from my soapbox here, if you were developing software, you should keep things like this in mind. In a large software program or package, components should be able to be added and removed and the programs should still work, and don’t create a worse experience for users who are used to using older versions of the product. New version should contain new functionality that ties in to the original purpose of the application; if you want to turn your image editor into a photo catalog, release a separate product, clarify the difference, and bundle it with your old one if you want but don’t force it on people.

(Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 was released last week. I tried it, and it’s a big improvement over XI, which itself improved as Corel released some patches for it over the last year. But I’ve already moved and I don’t really have any intention of moving back, especially when these upgrades are so incremental that I can’t really justify spending the $60 to upgrade. Also, there is still the issue of unexplained CPU usage when the program is idle, though it is certainly less than it was in XI.)

Now, I’m sure you had something better to do with your last ten minutes than sit around reading my rant. Go off and do something useful, will you!