Dean Rowe's WebLog : Windows DVD Maker

Cool mention of Windows Vista Movie Maker and DVD Maker

deanro — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:19:19 GMT

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2193575,00.asp

Yes I know it's a little gratuitous :-), but I got forwarded this link today and it is very cool to see someone that is really happy using the products you worked on.

Also, I know I need to start writing some more posts here and try to add some content instead of links to content :-).

Some things that are currently going on:

Just starting to work on the what the object model for Expression Encoder will look like.

I recently got a new laptop which is a tablet (Lenovo X61T). The handwriting recognition in Vista is awesome (I'm writing this with the pen), and the battery life is superb.

My wife is due to give birth to our daughter in about a week. So maybe if the baby keeps us up all night, I'll write some posts then :-)

RAW Support

deanro — Thu, 31 May 2007 08:02:46 GMT

I'm not sure how well known this is, but we did work in Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker to use the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) to make sure we supported images in the camera's RAW format.

I know some folks like to shoot photos in the RAW format and previously you would have to convert those files to JPG or something similar if you wanted to use them in Windows Movie Maker.

Well in Vista, if you've imported some RAW photos into your Photo gallery it will now give you the option to download the codec to support those files (every camera has it's own RAW format). I know the codec for Nikon camera's has been out for a while and Canon's was released not so long ago and there are probably other cameras supported too.

Once you've done that, you'll be able to view the photos in Photo Gallery and if you import them into Windows Movie Maker or Windows DVD Maker they will know how to use the photos directly as well.

Moved teams

deanro — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:07:48 GMT

I've been meaning to write this post for a while. For those that don't know I recently left the Video Memories Group to go and work on the Expression Media team.

It was way back in 1999, that I left the Visual C++ libraries team to go and work in a new group that was going to do something with video. In those days we weren't even sure what kind of application we wanted to build and we certainly hadn't started using the name Windows Movie Maker (we started calling our first prototype Mediapad).

A lot has happened since those early days, from the first version of Windows Movie Maker that we shipped in Windows ME, to the latest versions of Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker that are now in Windows Vista. I'm very proud of all the work that everyone on the team has accomplished over that time.

However 7 years or so is a pretty long time to be on a single team at Microsoft so after finishing Vista I felt it was a good time to have a little change in direction. I'm still in contact with my old teammates and I'm looking forward to trying out all the new stuff they come out with in the future. I also certainly won't be forgetting about Windows Movie Maker and DVD Maker as I still use them myself and you can expect me to write future posts about their features.

So now I'm on the Expressions team, specifically working on Expression Media Encoder. There aren't that many details released about the application yet, but we should be releasing more details at MIX07. In the meantime James Clarke (a most excellent PM on our team) mentioned a few details in this post, however there have been quite a few improvements in the application since then. Lots more to come ...

Windows DVD Maker Command Line Options

deanro — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:51:32 GMT

As well as the SDK, which you can use to build your own custom DVD menus, you can control which media is loaded upon startup and even get the burn to start automatically if desired.

Eric has just written a post detailing how this can be done.

Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker SDK Released

deanro — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 06:21:27 GMT

Looks like we've now got the Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker SDK available on microsoft.com.

Link

You can now create custom transitions and effects for Vista Movie Maker and your own custom DVD menu styles all using the power of the GPU.

Windows DVD Maker demonstrated in Billg's keynote at CES

deanro — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:08:00 GMT

It’s always cool to see something you’ve personally worked on being demonstrated to a bunch of people and I guess it doesn’t get much bigger than the keynote at CES.

You can watch the keynote on demand at the following link
http://www.microsoft.com/ces/

(The Windows DVD Maker stuff starts around 22 minutes into the program, but there’s a lot of other cool stuff too in the program)

Windows DVD Maker and Aspect Ratios

deanro — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 10:22:00 GMT

You may have noticed an innocent little setting in the options dialog called DVD aspect ratio. It allows you a single choice between 4:3 and 16:9.

You might think this will cause everything on the disc to be rendered as 4:3 or 16:9. However, as you may be aware, DVD’s allow a mixture of aspect ratios on a single disc. You can see this frequently on Hollywood discs where the main feature will be 16:9 and some of the extras may be 4:3.

We wanted DVD Maker to support generating DVD’s like these, so you can freely mix content of different aspect ratios on the same disc. When you add a video we will automatic detect its aspect ratio and render them appropriately either as 16:9 on the disc or as 4:3.

For DVD Menus, we will automatically generate them as 16:9 but we also specify the information so they can be rendered as 4:3 on a 4:3 display. This way the user doesn’t have to specify anything and they’ll get the desired behaviour of a menu that fills the screen. So for example if you have a 4:3 TV you should see a menu something like this.

and if you have a widescreen display you’ll see a menu something like this.

So if we do this stuff automatically, what does the setting in the option dialog do? Well for slideshows we can’t really determine the aspect ratio automatically, as images aren’t normally all 4:3 or all 16:9 so for slideshows we will use this setting and generate them as either 4:3 or 16:9, depending upon what you choose.

Windows Movie Maker project files gave us a little dilemma. Movie Maker for Windows XP and earlier doesn’t store the aspect ratio in the project file. Movie Maker uses a global option based upon the settings in its “Options” dialog. So when you add a Movie Maker project file to Windows DVD Maker we faced a choice, we could either use the current aspect ratio settings in the Movie Maker options dialog or use the settings in the DVD Maker options dialog. None of these choices were ideal, Movie Maker’s options may have changed since the project was saved and DVD Maker’s options might be different to the options in Movie Maker when the user created and edited their project.

To work around this problem, we changed Movie Maker in Vista so that it now stores the aspect ratio in the project file. This way every time you load a project in Movie Maker it will automatically switch to the aspect ratio that was being used when the project was saved. When you add the project to DVD Maker then DVD Maker will also use that aspect ratio. We can now be sure of using the correct aspect ratio and you can even add multiple Movie Maker project files with different aspect ratios and we’ll use the correct one for each. You can see this below where I added two project files, one that was created as 16:9 and one that was created as 4:3.

So this just leaves Movie Maker project files that were created in Windows XP or earlier which don’t hold the aspect ratio, so for those we’ll just default to the aspect ratio specified in DVD Maker's options dialog.

So to summarize, the aspect ratio setting within DVD Maker is mainly just used for slideshows and we’ll pretty much handle everything else automatically. So if you’re creating a slideshow and you know you’re mainly going to play back your DVD on widescreen displays choose 16:9, otherwise choose 4:3.

Vista Beta 2

deanro — Wed, 24 May 2006 04:37:00 GMT

Today, we announced the release of Vista Beta 2. It’s very cool to know that the new versions of Movie Maker and especially Windows DVD Maker are suddenly going to be in a lot of people’s hands. Personally I’m very much looking forward to seeing the feedback as it rolls in.

I’m now running Vista Beta 2 on my home machines along with Beta 2 of Office 2007 and I’d have to say it’s working pretty darn well. It’s very nice to use and I just can’t imagine going back to Windows XP now.

New Windows Vista Team Blog

deanro — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 02:08:00 GMT

The Windows Vista team blog was recently launched and includes posts from Lorrin Maughan who is a Product Manager with the Windows Client Marketing organization which covers Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker. There is one post about the Windows Photo Gallery but expects more posts about Movie Maker and DVD Maker in the future.

4:3 - Now with extra pixels

deanro — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:32:00 GMT

On my previous post, Rehan noticed that the 4:3 thumbnail didn't quite have the correct aspect ratio. Well thanks to Eric, thinks now look a little better.

DvdMaker and a little widescreen love

deanro — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 08:06:00 GMT

I've always been a little frustrated with applications that don't support 16:9 content or don't support it very well. Many applications have traditionally started by assuming that video fits within a 4:3 area and then 16:9 content gets letterboxed within that area (or in worse cases just stretched).

Not so for Windows DVD Maker. We've made sure that 16:9 content is a first class citizen. You'll see from the screen shot below where I've added a 4:3 video file and then a 16:9 video how the 16:9 thumbnail shows up as expected as a nice widescreen thumbnail. It gives me a warm glow inside to see all those extra pixels :-)

You'll also notice that all our DVD menu styles fully support 16:9 as well.

Windows Movie Maker on Vista

deanro — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:04:00 GMT

We're releasing more details about Windows Movie Maker on Vista. Check out the following link for a few more details.

Link

One of the most exciting features (besides the fact that you can now use Windows DVD Maker to publish your MovieMaker projects directly to DVD), is that we now take advantage of the graphics processor on your video card. This means that you're no longer limited to the 320 x 240 preview that we currently have in MovieMaker on Windows XP.

Windows DVD Maker

deanro — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:28:00 GMT

I know I haven't posted much recently, but I'm hoping to fix that, especially as more and more information comes out about Windows Vista.

The main thing I've been working on is Windows DVD Maker. Eric Gunnerson (who is on our team) has already posted a few articles including a few screenshots - check them out.

Introducing Windows DVD Maker
Windows DVD Maker FAQ
Windows DVD Maker - Add pictures and video page.
Windows DVD Maker - Hub Page

Lots more information to come :-)