| Wednesday,
January 28, 2004 The action is over in mail, as I try to
clean up here, and get ready for next month's column. A correspondent
recently called this place a "salon" and perhaps that's as good a
description as any.
However, there is a new virus warning:
Only two days after the original Mydoom/SCObig worm, a
variant has appeared. This worm, which I've dubbed SCObig.B, appears similar
to the original worm, but targets Microsoft as well as SCO for a DDoS
attack.
It also attempts to disable access to Symantec and various other AV sites by
overwriting the local HOSTS file. For more details, see:
<
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.mydoom.b@mm.html >
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
=======================
And on viruses and vulnerabilities, Roland
suggests you read all of this. So do I.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/215
In fact I thought this sufficiently important that I sent a mailer to the
subscribers calling their attention to it.
===============================
Then you might want to have a look at
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/myths_john_stossel_040123-1.html
I won't say I agree with all his conclusions, but it's interesting.
==============================================
I have a question about Microsoft Media Player 9: why
won't it play a DVD unless Power DVD is installed?
That is: my wife has had Media Player and a DVD drive on her machine for
a long time but she hasn't had any need to play DVD's on it. Then she got
one of her class reunion. She put it into the DVD drive and up popped
Windows officering to play it with Windows Media Player but when she said
"yes, do that," it informed her it couldn't because there wasn't a proper
decoder installed. I tried the experiment with a movie DVD and got the same
result.
We tried her class reunion DVD on the Mac and the result was horrible,
but that's a story for the column.
On all my machines I can play a movie with either Media Player or Power
DVD which I routinely install when I build the machines; I am not sure why I
didn't put it on her machine last year when I built it, but I did see that
she got Windows Media Player and assumed that would work.
It wouldn't and didn't. All attempt to play DVD video on her machine with
Windows Media Player (we downloaded the very latest version) got the message
that there was not a correct decoder.
Then I installed PowerDVD (which actually came with the hardware drive to
begin with), and lo! it not only would play the movie DVD and her DVD with
Power DVD, but it will play either of them using Windows Media Player now.
Clearly there is a "decoder" in PowerDVD that isn't present in Windows Media
Player, or am I doing something wrong? I expect I can find out by digging,
but perhaps one of you readers knows the answer? No speculation, please. I
can speculate, and if I need to I can dig up the answer, but with luck
someone knows and can tell me. Thanks.
Dear Sir:
Media Player and PowerDVD are both based on Microsoft
DirectShow. DirectShow defines COM objects called filters for manipulating
A/V files, including those on your DVD. Microsoft does not bundle a
DirectShow filter to decompress MPEG2 video. Perhaps a certain court case
discouraged them.
PowerDVD includes that filter. The MPEG2 decompression
filter is the most important thing you get when buying PowerDVD. Once it is
installed any DirectShow application including Media Player can use it.
Regards, Bob Wakefield
So. Thanks. I suspected it was something of that sort. And:
Re: Microsoft Media Player 9 & DVDs.
For all its glitter, Windows Media Player is just a
front-end for various video/audio decoders, known as "codecs". That is, when
it tries to play a video stream, it looks at the headers in said stream and
then attempts to use the appropriate libraries to decode (and, in your case,
decrypt) the data.
You can't play DVDs in Media Player 9 in an
"out-of-the-box" installation, because Windows lacks the ncessary CSS
decryption, MPEG2 video and AC3 audio libraries. Once you install a
3rd-party DVD player, however, the codecs are available to the rest of the
system and all should be well.
The same holds true for other video formats like DiVX
or Xvid and (to a lesser exent) Quicktime.
Ed Armstrong
What confused me was that at the Microsoft Media Summit last Fall, they
talked a lot about their superior codec for Media Player 9 and how it was
better than anyone else's. I guess I still need to look up just why they
don't supply one. Perhaps it is in developer tools. In any event, once
Cyberlink Power DVD was installed everything worked. Power DVD comes free
with the DVD drive; nearly all DVD drives have one or another DVD player
software.
AH! Ed Armstrong says:
Are you sure you're not confusing WMP9's new DVD
navigation interface and the new WMF streaming formats with support for the
actual DVD standard itself? I'm pretty sure that Microsoft does not have a
CSS license key, nor an internal MPEG-2/AC3 codec. They _do_ have a
propriertary MPEG-4 codec, but that's WMF/ASF and doesn't have anything to
do with DVD playback.
Which is undoubtedly the explanation. Thanks!
Our, uh, interesting experience with the Mac and Roberta's class
reunion DVD goes in the column.
Wednesday TOP
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