Download Windows Vista Codecs

Natively, Windows Vista supports a wide range of formats and standards, allowing users to streamline file management to a maximum. But, there are scenarios in which Vista, in the configuration it ships by default, is unable to handle some file formats. Case in point: camera RAW file formats. Professional photographers will tell you that universal standards, such as JPEG, do not even come close to satisfying the need of capturing and having available as much information as possible in a single digital photography. This is where RAW comes in. The RAW file formats are proprietary standards, intimately connected with SLR cameras (varying with make and model) that offer superior image quality to mainstream formats.

“One of the features we added in Windows Vista was a platform to support for decoding camera raw images in Windows Photo Gallery (and later Windows Live Gallery), Windows Explorer, and Win32 & WPF applications. The camera IHV community has done a great job supporting this effort by creating codecs that enable raw files for various cameras. The Microsoft Professional Photography website just posted a page where you can download Codecs for Windows for your camera”, revealed Kam Vedbrat, a Microsoft lead program manager, who worked on the Aero User Interface of Windows Vista.

Microsoft has been hard at work to ensure that Windows Vista (and sometimes Windows XP ) supports a wide range of RAW file formats. In this context, the Redmond company has collaborated with camera manufacturers, such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax and ArdFry, to produce a wide range of codecs designed to be integrated with the Windows operating system. Following the implementation of the codecs, users will be able to manage digital images saved in RAW file formats directly from Vista and XP.

“Windows Vista attempts to solve these problems by providing an extensible platform that allows support for these (and other) new file formats to be added to Windows by the owner of the file format. This support comes in the form of a codec, which users will get from their camera manufacturer, either by downloading it, or provided with a new camera body. The Photo Gallery will even detect the presence of these files and help you download a codec when it exists”, Microsoft added.

SomethinAwful.com Down! How Awful Is That?

SomethingAwful.com, the comedy website hosting a huge amount of humorous content, went offline a few days ago, apparently because of some DNS problems. Nobody knew for sure what had happened there, so people started asking questions on the website’s forum. No less than seven forum pages got full of users’ questions, but no official posted any message to explain the outage and provide a solution.

That was until yesterday, when Generic Admin published a message on the forum saying, according to The Register, that “we’re still trying to find out exactly what happened. The nameservers on our domain record were reset to the Network Solutions nameservers. I called NS support, and they said that someone had logged in the NS domain manager and clicked on ‘manage DNS’ or something, and that reset it. There are only two people with the network solutions login, and neither of us have logged in or made any change.”

The good thing about this downtime is that no information was stolen, as the website doesn’t host any private detail, the same person explained.

“Nothing on our network appears compromised. Someone logged in at Network Solutions and played with the nameserver settings. We’re not happy about it, but let’s keep things in perspective. SA does not store full credit card numbers (only last four digits), expiration dates, or CVV2 codes. Our merchant provider recently conducted an audit to make sure we were complying with the king’s laws of Internet business, and apparently we passed with flying colors”, he continued.

At this time, the website is accessible for every user out there, as the problems have recently been fixed. However, if you want to get more details about the outage, you can read the seven-page forum discussion hosted by the SomethingAwful’s website, available on this link.