Multimedia in the Windows 7 Beta

The word codec is a veritable Mason-Dixon meridian, a line of demarcation that defines membership in the tech savvy. Do you wince when you read it? Or are you a proud member of the geek elite who takes pride in knowing the acronyms that keep our computers afloat in YouTube videos and BitTorrented files? I'll walk you through the changes that Windows 7 will bring to the world of multimedia, with a focus on improvements to compatibility with those codecs at the OS level—planned improvements, anyway.
For those with a life outside of computers, the word codec comes from the term compression/decompression algorithm. It's simply software that provides your computer with the ability to read media files compressed using a particular format, and it's the heart of multimedia on PCs. This compression usually reduces the transfer time of large files through the relatively slow connections of the Internet, so they consume less hard drive space as well (though that's less important in this age of 2TB hard drives).

Popular common codecs include PCM (or pulse-code modulation) used by audio CDs, the MPEG-2 standard used by DVDs, and H.264 used for downloadable movies—along with AAC audio, which Apple uses in its online store. Just as there are many codecs, different containers exist to wrap around this plethora of video and audio codecs. These containers have names like AVI, Real Media, and QuickTime, as well as less common forms like DivX and Matroska (MKV).

In the past, codec issues were the bane of even an advanced Windows user's existence. To play a compressed movie on a laptop or an Xbox 360 connected to your television, you had to make sure that the video was in the right format for the device's playback capabilities. Frequently this meant installing codec packs that could affect playback of other media on the computer. Codec installations in Windows, frankly, are a mess. Try explaining a "codec not supported" error to a living-room audience waiting for the show to start.

Vista includes codecs for playback of MP3s, Windows Media files, and even DVDs, a vast improvement over Windows XP Media Center Edition, which required a third-party driver just to watch DVDs and HDTV. Windows 7 will go further, including built-in support for many more popular codecs. While Microsoft has not yet officially announced which will be included with the new operating system when it ships, this unknown is in good company with an unknown ship date along with an unknown price.

Test Configuration

To test the media playback capabilities in Windows 7, I used three machines. I took two old computers formerly running Windows XP and installed the publicly available 32-bit beta, "build 7000." The test hardware was a Compaq Presario V2000 laptop with a 1.5-GHz Pentium M and an Intel 915GM video chipset, and a Shuttle SN45G/V2 desktop with an AMD 3000+ CPU and an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS.

To test the 64-bit version of Windows 7, I used a new 2.4-GHz Apple MacBook Pro (Aluminum) with the Nvidia 9400M video chipset and 2GB of RAM. Bootcamp lets you install Windows (even the 64-bit version) on the MacBook, but it won't allow you to run the installer correctly by default for full driver support. The trick is to run the Leopard 10.5.5 DVD by ignoring the system-type watchdog on the 64-bit installer.

1. Go to DOS by clicking the Windows "start logo" and type CMD. Then press Enter.

2. Change to the drive containing the Leopard DVD, in my case D: Press enter again.

3. Type cd "Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple"

4. Type msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi

This hardware ranges from a five-year-old Windows XP box to a three-year-old basic laptop (both with 1GB of RAM) to the latest Intel and Nvidia mobile technology in the MacBook. Because Windows 7 is optimized for netbooks as well as high-power machines, running this older hardware should not pose the same problems that inadequate configurations caused in Windows Vista.