Digital Workshop

I have a publication I did for a client in Opus Pro XE 5.5. It has run perfectly on all XP based PC's, with over 60K copies out there.

The client recently purchased all new Dell PC's with Vista. They contacted me that the MPEG-1 (320x240 / 30FPS) do not display when run on the Vista PC's. I don't have Vista here, but tried the following:

Republished in Opus 6 (final release). Changed the video from embedded to run from a folder outside the publication. It all continues to work fine when run on XP, but still no joy with Vista. I instructed the client to turn off the AERO interface. Still no joy!

While this is not an emergency situation, I need to feel comfortable going forward that my Opus work will run in Vista. I will soon buy a copy of Vista to test on here, but until then does anyone know what the problem may be?

Thanks,
Bill

Bill --

I don't have Vista, and have no plans on getting it for a long time, so I can't test your question. If you change your Video Object from "Chroma," which uses an internal OPUS video player to display the video/audio from your MPEG-1 file, to "On Top" which uses the Windows Media Player to display the video/audio, maybe that will solve the problem.

I would first do a "proof" that you can successfully see/hear the MPEG-1 file by trying to run it directly using the Vista Windows Media Player. If it works outside OPUS, then it should work when called from within OPUS. Make sense?

Please let us know what happens. What about a confirmation from some "brave" soul who's started to use Vista?

Hi Fred. Good to hear from you!

Yes, the client is able to play the videos in Media Player. Just not in Opus. I did not test with video-on-top, which would not be a viable solution for my publications.

Judging from the lack of responses, it may be that others are having not problems with Opus and Vista. Even so, until I can test it here, I am worried about taking on new projects.

Would love to hear from DW on this.

Take good care Fred and thanks,
Bill

Bill, I have exactly the same problem - Vista - No Video
Did you resolve the issue - can you offer any advice
Thanks,
Tony

We are also experiencing this problem:

We have a pub made on XP with Opus 6. Only video clips that are set as "rendered" are correctly played back on Vista pcs.

Is there a Vista setting that could be changed to alow playback?

Thanks, Linda

To allow video within Opus to play on Vista PCs:

Control Panel / Appearance settings
Change from Windows Aero
to Windows Vista Basic

Mack: in another thread, you said "The update to Opus / Plexus is designed to switch Vista to Aero Basic which is something we have been using for a year now anyway as this solves the video / graphics issues but this will happen automatically at the customers' end."

Is this Opus update available? Does it mean that if I produce a pub on XP, and it's played on a pc with Aero, then Aero will temporarily be turned off?

Many thanks, Linda

Hi Linda,

I know that one of the updates does this and I've been told that this is what happens.

My expereince of this is through Plexus which now works and switches Vista to Aero Basic so either Plexus is fixed or one of the Window's auto updates has changed something.

Because Aero Basic uses the CPU for the GUI, you should find that the system slows down, but to be honest our test machine has Vista and a Pentium M processor with 1GB and poodles along fine even when showcasing our IKIQ software. You can drop a CPU monitor onto the Vista sidebar as see what difference A/Basic makes. I would imagine that most people presenting from a laptop have probably got better spec machines than our old test one. Not sure if I mentioned in the last post, but apparently in the Nvidia graphics chips that cause Vista more problems (we have an ATI X700) but not been able to test this.

Turn A/Basic automatically off is probably a reasonable solution for DW and won't impact much for those running full screen anyway, but I hope that this is an option rather than a requirement as Vista will eventually stabilise. You could (in Vista Beta) turn aero on/off via the run command but this no longer appears possilbe .

Mack