This might be a "minor" thing but what the hell is going on with Microsoft's Windows division these days?

Shot in the foot after shot in the foot, it seems to be even more dysfunctional and rudderless than normal.

How odd. The patents on AC-3 expired 7 years ago, but maybe they were still paying royalties for the decoder implementation they were shipping? And since Windows hasn't included a DVD player or ATSC TV player (Windows Media Center) in years, I guess there wouldn't be much else using AC-3 on a PC.

> patents on AC-3 expired 7 years ago

Does that apply to the newer version of the codec? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Digital_Plus

Doesn't DVD video commonly use AC3 to encode audio? That's what I remember from my DVD ripping days at least. Does that mean DVD cannot be read on windows anymore? Or probably it was already the case since apparently they already dropped support for MPEG2 video by default

Does this article read a little strange to anyone else? They keep repeating the same thing a few times like trying to fill space.

Windows 11 also won't render thumbnails for HEVC videos without a third party utility like Icaros.

Is this about royalties or some unspecified technical problem?

I love how Microsoft and Apple have the diametric opposite attitude to supporting their customers.

Apple: "It just works"

Microsoft: "It used to just work, but we put a stop to that. Here's a knowledge base article with fifteen easy-to-follow steps for working around the problem we just caused. Step 13 is permanently broken.[1] Here's a public forum where you can complain to other users. We regularly bulk delete comments from that forum."

[1] E.g.: Like the Dolby Vision app which worked for about two weeks and then never again: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/dolby-vis...

AC-3 isn't something I use on computers. Apple on the other hand dropped support for AptX codec for bluetooth.

Apple's solution to competing on quality seems to be to lower the quality of 'supported' third party products. This is a game they've been playing a long time, first I really noticed is when Dell displays connected to Macs 'negotiated' to use a YPbPr color format rather than RGB. There was an internal memo exposed a long time ago where the instruction was 'make it look like a plausible bug' in lower quality of third party device support.

Do you have some sort of reference to the "plausible bug" thing? That's shocking. Well, not that shocking...

I wish I could, but today's search engines wont.

Apple's marketing: "it just works"

Apple's reality on Radar database: "when it doesn't work we don't have idea why and we will hardly answer back"

It just works can mean anything.

Root login with an empty password for example.

>Apple: "It just works"

Apple isn't a stronghold of backwards compatibility more like the opposite.

I hate MS forum and all those totally-no-ms-employe independent experts with canned responses. They also did few change which caused a lot of links on google search and windows 10 to be just broken.

Is that substantially different from the 30k point "experts" on Apple's forums that just paste copypasta and deny there are any problems with their perfect hardware with its perfect OS?