Microsoft has acknowledged that its Anniversary Update of Windows 10 released earlier this month is causing problems for millions of webcams.
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If you’ve been itchin’ to get your hands on Hewlett-Packard’s flagship Elite x3 Windows 10 Mobile smartphone, the wait is going to be just a bit longer – two weeks longer in fact. Because that “tiny and inexpensive” NUC is a 600 dollar Skylake-S based NUC6i7KYK, and secondly – the demo wasn’t being rendered and calculated with real world physics, but rather a passive playback of the interface.
The EFF has called for Microsoft to “come clean with its user community” and provide “meaningful opt-outs” to the users that are more privacy conscious. Some users even complained that their PCs were freezing up after installing the update. This included bundling update apps in security patches and perhaps Microsoft’s biggest blunder – in terms of diminishing user trust – making the X a symbol of consent (upgrade), not merely closing a window.
“Microsoft has tried to explain this lack of choice by saying that Windows Update won’t function properly on copies of the operating system with telemetry reporting turned to its lowest level”, adds Kalia. Following the update, only YUY2 encoding is supported. Many webcams encode their data in compressed streams.
The problem is caused by a new feature that allows multiple apps, such as Windows Hello facial recognition app and the Hololens augmented reality headset, to access a computer’s webcam at the same time, explained Mike M. from the Windows Camera Team on Windows Dev Center forum on August 12.
THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) has lashed out at Microsoft over the company’s “blatant disregard” for user privacy with the pushy, data-slurping Windows 10 operating system. Previously if, say, Skype was using the camera, these other services couldn’t.
It seems the problem arises from a change to the way Windows 10 decodes webcam video streams, but the following steps, via Thurrott.com controbutor Rafael Rivera, should fix the issue.
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A Microsoft camera engineer who reacted to criticisms on the support thread said the firm had done “a lousy job” of letting folks know about the change. Make sure you have a backup of your Windows machine before attempting registry changes. However, the company concedes that it “dropped the ball” on the documentation front.
