Next version of Windows Live

re: Next version of Windows Live

someone — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:31:51 GMT

What a disappointment. No Movie Maker for XP. Limited configuration for WMV. Movie Maker remains a shameful app, they only thing worthwhile now is uploading to online sites. I can't believe how MS believe everyone is happy with WMV-only output and whether even a V1 release can be considered complete without output to *at least* AVI, MPEG-1/MPEG Layer II Audio, MPEG-2/Dolby, MP4 (MPEG-4/AAC), MOV and FLV. Although AVI and MPEG1 are a bit old, they're much needed for compatibility reasons. Also DivX and Xvid use AVI. For MPEG-1, licensing isn't needed from the MPEG committee, for MPEG-2/DVD MS already have the components in DVD Maker, why can't it simply reuse them, for MOV, they can use the QuickTime SDK (no need to implement their own support). Only remaining are FLV (which is being phased out by Adobe but popular due to YouTube) and MP4/H.264/AAC (which is being adopted as an international standard on devices, Blu-ray, YouTube everywhere and MS has even pledge Silverlight support. Even if MS gets output right in V1, users will be happy. I want to be able to do some serious stuff with my camcorder and Movie Maker, not just upload videos to YouTube-like sites.

re: Next version of Windows Live

someone — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:36:18 GMT

Forgot to add: Please have an idea about where your Movie Maker app stands compared to other video editing apps in the software industry. By that scale, Live Mail, Live Photo Gallery, Live Writer, Live Messenger and Family Safety do their job well. Live Movie Maker does *NOT*.

re: Next version of Windows Live

someone — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:39:27 GMT

Also, I want to say about Photo Gallery. Why is that Google's Picasa managed to deliver Vista like themed-slideshow effects on XP and MS's Live Photo Gallery does not? There should be absolute feature parity between XP and Vista versions.

re: Next version of Windows Live

dan.carter — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:00:50 GMT

Whoops! Maybe it is just me, but after updating Live Photo Gallery with the new beta, I can't open images, not even JPG. I receive "an error is preventing the photo or video from being displayed". Videos seem to play fine.

Obviously, this could be a major issue.

Any help would be welcome..

re: Next version of Windows Live

gcoupe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:01:19 GMT

Shame that, nearly a year after I reported it (and it was acknowledged), the bug in Windows Live Photo Gallery publishing to Flickr is still there...

See http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!4317.entry

re: Next version of Windows Live

mike_mu — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:20:31 GMT

First impressions about the WLPG beta wave 3:

- clean new layout. Slideshow button disappeared, but added to the menu. Direct starred filtering. Me happy ;-)

- face tagging added. However the following shortcomings apply:

+ The existing tags naming people (people/john doe) cannot be moved to the face tags.

+ No hierarchy is available in face tagging. Problematic if you have lots of people in there

+ The face recognition does not work flawlessly. I have a photo of my daughter with a shirt; the print of which gets 2 face tags added to.

- Background status updates now always shown.

- Color profile somehow reinterpreted; photos that used to show nicely are now waaay oversaturated.

re: Next version of Windows Live

Fredrik74 — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:21:17 GMT

Congratulations on the Beta but what's up with doing absolutely nothing about the horrible Slide show feature?

In XP you could get a high quality slideshow just by pressing the slideshow icon in the image viewer. In Vista with Photo Gallery, it takes forever to start the slideshow and resolution is lowered to match that of monitors from the 1990s. As a result, all high-res photos looks horrible and blurred.

By adjusting the "Theme" to Classic I can get higher resolution BUT if the image is taken with a high megapixel camera, the resize algorithm you use is just not acceptable, the images get jaggied and do not look anywhere near HD quality.

Are you lazy, do you just not care... It just totally amazes me that you as the world largest software company is unable to make picture slideshows work when every other photo application can. I could of course use Picasa, Windows XP, Adobe or Irfanview, but the tagging capabilites and the general interface are better in Photo Gallery.

re: Next version of Windows Live

jtbworld — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:53:46 GMT

Movie Maker beta should rather be called Movie Maker alpha.

I hope next version adds more and new transitions as well as effects compared to the real Move Maker that comes with Vista.

re: Next version of Windows Live

mollyfud — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:13:47 GMT

Would love you (or Someone else) to make the people tags able to be used as tags when uploading to flickr.

Is the People Tags available via the API or stuff?

TIA

Molly

PS. Love the new release so far!

re: Next version of Windows Live

VinegarDoppio — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:55:21 GMT

The new version of Photo Gallery as a bug, in the People tags.

The first time I saw in the people tag all my contacts

but after I saw that Windows Live Contacts has duplicated my contacts I decides to erase the doubles contacts

and now I can't see in People tags, my contacts

why?

re: Next version of Windows Live

atp — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:16:41 GMT

Windows Live Photo Gallery

I like the new appearance, and the face tagging. That's the good stuff.

But where is GeoTagging support?

GeoTagging is a hugely-growing aspect of photography right now. Picasa has a pretty adequate interface to it; with the power of Live Maps you could do much better (your aerial photos are dramatically better than Google's in my area).

I'm hoping this will make it into the final version.

regards,

/alan

re: Next version of Windows Live

mike_mu — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:43:55 GMT

Face tagging, while a good idea, is pretty useless in its current incarnation. I have now let the SW detect all the faces on my 10000 photo collection. It found some 4500 faces in there. Now it expects me to go to each photo and tag the found square. This is unworkable.

- Why o why can't it just show the found squares in the browser and let me select a bunch of those and name the tag? Like Adobe Photoshop Elements does this for already a very long time? This, at the very least, is required to make it workable

- Could it be more like picasa web albums and suggest the tags based on previous enterings (so face recognition, as opposed to mere detection).

- What's up with leaving the hierarchy option out of it? I would really like the option.

- What's so fundamentally different between a People tag and a descriptive tag that we cannot make existing descriptive tags into face tags? I have already tagged most of the people on the photos as people/Family/Barbara etc. Having to re-do this is like having access to a bike, but still being forced to walk.

- If we can have a People tag special category, I would also like a Location category, preferrably including a geotag. Again, allowing selection of multiple photos to drop on a map is paramount.

- The resize option creates a resized duplicate, which is great. Even better would be the option to automatically remove all tags from this file, so it wouldn't show up as double in the browser (and sensitive information would be stripped from the file). A default save-to location would also be very helpful here.

- I can't get the slideshow to NOT change resolution to something non-native on my LCD. This is getting really annoying (Vista business).

re: Next version of Windows Live

Alun Jones — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:55:17 GMT

Okay, so the facial detection feature is a step forward, in that it makes it possible to associate an area of an image with a particular individual, but I was really hoping that the tool could take my first few face selections, and infer (to some stated degree of certainty) the identity of faces detected in other pictures. Is this something you'll be adding, or not? [I envision it saying "okay, you've got a half dozen pictures labeled 'Alun' - here are other faces I've identified that I think are Alun, from the most likely to the least above a certain threshold. Drag the slider down to select the group of pictures that are definitely Alun (which will make me in future tag any picture with that certainty as Alun), and check the boxes next to any that are less certain by our algorithms, but which are definitely you."]

Also, it'd be nice to have the ability to mark a face as "unimportant".

One last note - face-painting seems to completely kill the face detection algorithm. I have several photos of my son at an event where his face was painted with a flag - none of these are recognised as faces.

re: Next version of Windows Live

gcoupe — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:24:58 GMT

A showstopper bug as far as I'm concerned is that WLPG only finds IPTC/XMP metadata in image files on a hit or miss basis. This is totally unacceptable. See here for a full description and illustration of the problem:

http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!5424.entry

re: Next version of Windows Live

avasaralak — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:40:03 GMT

Face recognition

I installed WLPG Beta. I used the people tag options and marked a few photos of myself as a tag. I was expecting most if not all of the photos with me in them to be displayed when I filtered on that tag.

However, the filter only showed the photos that I manually tagged.

Is this the way the feature is supposed to work ? Or am I missing something ?

re: Next version of Windows Live

aasics — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:45:34 GMT

I have noticed that while on my computer, even if I have not been running WLPG Beta 3 recently, that the process "WLXPhotoGallery3.exe" will start running at 50% CPU for no apparent reason, and won't go down unless I kill the process.

I don't notice any HDD access during this time, so I'm a little confused as to what is causing this. Usually the process will hover around 9,700 K of memory, but I have seen it climb to as much as 30 K.

Again, this is while it is not supposed to be running.

Any clues?

re: Next version of Windows Live

marauderz — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:34:07 GMT

I made a login just for the express reason so I can say this.

Windows Live Movie Maker Beta right now IS A JOKE!!

I've been using Windows Movie Maker for both XP and Vista for a long time since all I needed was to chop clips and put them together so I could upload them and surprisingly after everything else I've gone through (Adobe Primere Elements, various other things I can't remember) Movie Maker was still the easiest program in terms of allowing me to splice and edit my video clips.

The latest 'BETA' or rather alpha like someone else has mentioned is a joke because it seems to imply that users do not need to edit clips to tirm out the uninteresting bits but rather just need to concat clips together. I'm sorry but I can't get everything correct at the time of the recording!

Also.. where are the encoding profiles? One thing I loved about Windows Movie Maker was that while there are preset profiles, I can still tweak my own so I can tailor the output for my needs. obviously a casual user doesn't require this but please keep the ability to create our own profiles around.

Please remember that there are people who use movie maker for videos OTHER than for the purpose of uploading to youtube or making DVDs

re: Next version of Windows Live

aasics — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:04:01 GMT

I think a lot of people are misinterpreting the position of Windows LIVE Movie Maker. Maybe I am as well, but I think that the Windows LIVE Movie Maker is NOT trying to replace Windows Movie Maker, but rather is making one tailored specifically for the Live suite.

If you need more features, use the Windows Movie Maker. However, if all you're doing is pushing out a slideshow or string of smaller clips then this is a program that will do it simply, quickly, and efficiently.

re: Next version of Windows Live

marauderz — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:05:08 GMT

but the worry here is that what if Live Movie Maker IS intended to replace Windows Movie Maker?

re: Next version of Windows Live

aasics — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:31:58 GMT

Well, marauderz, I stand corrected.

re: Next version of Windows Live

emiliano84 — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:29:09 GMT

when a service like photos.live.com integrated with skydrive and spaces...i hope soon!!!

and change soapbox in videos.live.com the future is everything "live"

re: Next version of Windows Live

emiliano84 — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:30:04 GMT

when videos.live.com ???

when a service like photos.live.com integrated with skydrive and spaces...i hope soon!!!

and change soapbox in videos.live.com the future is everything "live"