August 2009 Entries
As you may or may not know, Windows 7 finally adds native support for MPEG-4. This is excellent news and reduces much of the need for adding additional codecs to be installed on the system. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not see fit to incorporate support for the Matroska (mkv)container format (they still like AVI and ASF more). There was good support out there from open source projects, but not for 64-bit systems. Now Divx has made available a preview of a high-performance, Media Foundation implementation (successor to DirectShow released with Vista) of a Matroska container reader that works with both 32-bit...
So I’ve tried to install the LEGO Mindstorms NXT software on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. It’s definitely a disappointment so far. I didn’t even want to install at first. That was easily enough remedied though. Be sure to run setup.exe as Administrator and run it in Vista compatibility mode. As it installs it warns about an unknown Bluetooth driver. I’m just using the built-in Microsoft stack. The install completely successfully after that warning. Upon launch of the application, all is well. I can perform all operations related to programming. I can create a program, save it, and load...
If you get the error “Error encountered while copying audio stream” after recording a project in Captivate (eLearning screen/demo capture software), then there’s hope for you. I found this post that distills info from an Adobe thread and fixes the issue by just registering a COM DLL. The issue is stated as affecting Vista 64-bit, but I got the same issue on Win7 64-bit. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon! LINK: http://www.codeblog.co.uk/2009/07/18/other-stuff/adobe-captivate-4-error-encountered-while-copying-audio-stream-vista-x64/
I’m loving Windows 7 64-bit so far, but I get a few very strange issues. Both DemoMate and Adobe Captivate fail to capture effective and consistently. I’m working with DemoMate to figure this out, but I only have a trial of Captivate so I’m not sure how good support would be. For the most part I’ve had good luck with 32-bit software running when there’s no 64-bit executable, but lower-level stuff just crashes and burns! Most machines in the past 2-3 years have had support for 64-bit. Few people seem to use it since XP and Vista made it...