From
Barry Goffe
Director, Windows Vista Ultimate
Microsoft Corporation

When we launched Windows Vista in January 2007, we identified Windows Ultimate Extras as a unique series of add-ons that would be available to Windows Vista Ultimate customers. To date, we have released four sets of Extras – Windows Hold’Em, 16 Language Packs for the Windows multi-language user interface, Secure Online Key Backup, and Windows BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool. We want to let our Windows Vista Ultimate customers know that we are actively working to deliver the remaining Extras that we identified in January. Our goal is to provide the highest-quality, most secure and reliable offerings, and as a result we are continuing our work on these offerings. We apologize for taking so long to provide a status update to customers.

We intend to ship Windows DreamScene and the remaining 20 Language Packs by the end of the summer. We will not ship the last two Extras showcased in January (Windows DreamScene and the remaining 20 Language Packs) until they meet the high quality bar required by our enthusiastic customers—and we believe that we can achieve that bar by the end of this summer.

Source:

http://windowsultimate.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/07/02/update-on-the-windows-ultimate-extras.aspx

This is what Michael Dragone from Ars Technica posted:

We’ve been testing the iPhone for a few days now, and while it’s still too early to reveal the full results of our testing, we feel compelled to note that the iPhone and Windows Vista do not always play well together. If you’re heading out to pick up an iPhone and you’re a Windows Vista user, be prepared to wrestle with your computer.

You might want to take a look at the comments there too:

see: http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?HeadlineIndex=40022

I know it’s just because we’re the coolest box that you picked ours to abuse. And, while I like Emerald and Ruby fine as names, if you want all the features, come on, you want ours. Does Ruby sound more ultimate than Ultimate? No. If Microsoft adopted a gem theme, we’d be Dawnstone.

WSUS and Ultimate Extras

Many Ultimate users will have never heard of WSUS, but a vocal minority will be interested in this blog entry. Currently, if your computer is administered by WSUS 2.5, you cannot install Ultimate Extras. So what’s going on?

First, for those not in the know, WSUS is Windows Server Update Services, a technology that allows IT administrators to deploy the latest Microsoft product updates to their users’ computers, or block updates they do not want users to install. If you are a home user, it is very unlikely WSUS is in your house (and you know if it is). However, if you are running Windows at work, then your company may have deployed WSUS.

If you want to see if your computer is administered by WSUS, it is easy. Open the Windows Update control panel and look at the line of text which begins “You receive updates:” If the text after that is “Managed by your system administrator” then WSUS is active, otherwise, not.

This all is very technical, and might sound pretty far afield from Windows Ultimate and Ultimate Extras, but it’s not. For instance, a number of small businesses are choosing Ultimate for its complete feature set and Extras, and WSUS to reduce administration costs. In any case, Extras are not available for WSUS admins to deploy, so computers in WSUS-managed domains cannot install any Extras.

That’s not a good situation for customers, so we plan to improve it. The Ultimate team is working with Windows Update to revise the Extras to be offered to WSUS.

This change will mean all users of Ultimate—even business users, provided their IT administration approves—will have the choice of installing Ultimate Extras. Administrators will still be able to block offering and installation of Extras, so our team can’t tell every user they can get Extras, but more of you will have the option.

Why was it not this way from the beginning? We’re a small team, and Ultimate was designed more as a consumer-focused edition of Windows Vista. We cut support for WSUS at launch to reduce the test burden, and because we didn’t think many WSUS environments would deploy Ultimate. We’re hearing that we were wrong, so all the Wave Zero Extras will be offered to WSUS later this year. There will be either an announcement on this site, or I will cover it in this blog, but we’ll let you know.

Thanks for the feedback!

While looking at our bandwidth usage spike after we posted the wallpaper, I was reminded of a conversation that Alex and I had about the Ultimate video we posted a few weeks ago. You saw the final version of the deployment (soapbox + download center), but there is a funny story behind how we decided to use those technologies that I can’t resist sharing.

The versions we posted, which are already much smaller than the original raw video, are still about 100 MB. Alex, since he was the one who put all the time into capturing the video’s content, was very eager to make it live. He thought the quickest way would be to use this site’s new download section. And of course he’s right. But that suggestion led to the following conversation.

Erik: There’s no way we should do that.
Alex: Why not?
Erik: We’ll run out of our bandwidth allotment.
Alex: Don’t we have infinite bandwidth?
Erik: Well, effectively. But not for free, we’ll start paying for it.
Alex: Really, when?
Erik: I don’t know. I haven’t seen our hosting contract.
Alex: How much are we talking? We have money for this sort of thing.
Erik: (Rapidly creating an uninformed guess.) Well, after some hundreds of downloads, say, we might pay a quarter per user.

[pause, while both do mental math using the site’s traffic]

Alex: That kind of money would be a different conversation.

A few mails to our hosting provider—and a quick round of more precise math—later, we sent mail to the Soapbox team. As we wrote on the front page, they hooked us up. So don’t fear for our poor server, or our community budget—go see the video if you’re interested. And be glad we did the math, because directing a Slashdot/Digg effect on ourselves would have been pretty… oh, you probably wish we hadn’t done the math.  However, thousands and thousands of you have been able to download the larger version from the Microsoft download center, which would not have been possible from here!

Have you ever asked yourself:  What are the attributes of a great piece of content for Windows DreamScene?  I get asked this question a lot, particularly from people who are trying to create their own.  The answer is rather long, so why not blog about it :)? 

Turns out we think about many aspects before we deem something DreamScene worthy.  I usually break my answer in three sections: 1) attributes of the content; 2) attributes of the rendering and 3) attributes of the encoding.  What follows is an explanation for each of these sections…

From a content perspective:

• Keep the camera angle static, so no zooming, panning etc or people will either puke or turn you off after a few seconds
• Try to bring interest in the top quarter and bottom quarter of the video so that you can get motion coming through the glass surfaces in Vista
• Keep the loop to about ~30 seconds in length
• Make sure the content is visually appealing, and the composition of the frame is appealing
• Beware of the areas of motion.  Make sure that where there is motion, that the motion is not distracting.  Make sure the type of motion doesn’t make folks dizzy or lean to one side etc
• Make sure there is enough motion to warrant the DreamScene content
• Take a look at how the content looks as a still (paused).  Make sure it looks as good as a static background would look in terms of quality and appeal
• Make sure the DreamScene content looks great under the glass surface.  Some of the best content I’ve seen is content that only comes alive when you have about 80% of your real estate taken up by other apps and windows, and all you can see is the DreamScene content sipping through the 10% or less of the glass areas
• Make sure it is something you can easily loop :)
• Consider how the content looks in both 16:9 as well as 4:3.  You don’t control the positioning style and your content should behave nicely in either scenario.  In our case we optimize for 16:9 but also test the content on 4:3 to ensure the areas of interest aren’t cropped straight out of the video

From a rendering perspective:

• Render the content natively at 720p
• Have the content natively rendered at 16:9, but make sure it crops nicely at 4:3
• Cap the rendering at 30 fps. Bonus points if you can make something interesting at 15 fps. 
• Make sure the first frame and the last frame of the video go together so you get a sense it keeps going forever. 
• Output the final results as raw and uncompressed AVI (or other uncompressed and raw format)

From an encoding perspective:

• Pre-process everything to progressive (don’t let the encoder do the de-interlacing)
• If you need to scale to 1280×720, do so with XScaler
• At the end of the day the biggest variable will be the bitrate.  I suggest you start with encodes at 1.5, 3 & 5 MBps and then check.  At the end of the day you are looking to find a happy medium between CPU utilization, files size (i.e., download time) and video quality.  This is primarily determined by the bitrate you choose. 
• I have mixed feelings on what the ideal key frame distance should be.  It is supposed to just repeat the current frame in the buffer but we don’t want to wait too long for the next key frame.  Therefore, we go with something between 3-5 seconds. 
• Lastly you need to decide if you are going to be encoding an MPG or a WMV. 
• If you choose the WMV route I suggest:

• 5 Mbps WMV
• Select video stream WM video Stream 1
• Width: 1280
• Height: 720
• Aspect Ratio: 16:9, Pixel [1:1]
• Encoder: Windows Media Video 9
• Framerate: 29.97
• Bitrate: 4991
• Bitrate type: CBR
• Number of passes: 1
• Seconds / Keyframe: 1
• Image quality: 97
• Interlacing: Non-Interlaced
• Buffer: 5000
• Video Codec: Complex Auto
• No Audio

• 15 & 8 Mbps MPEG2
• Stream Format: Generic ISO MPEG Stream
• Stream Type: MPEG-2 Elementary Stream
• Width: 1280
• Height: 720
• Frame rate: 29.976
• Interlacing: Non-Interlaced
• Aspect Ratio Code: 16:9
• Quality/Speed: Mastering Quality
• Bitrate type: CBR
• Video Bitrate: 15000 (8000)
• Profile/Level: HP@HL
• VBV Buffer Size: 1492
• Max GOP Size: 15
• Closed GOP: yes
• Chroma Format: 4:2:0
• Intra DC Precision: 9
• Strict GOP bitrate: No
• No audio used
• Insert one sequence header before each GOP

And this is about it <phew>!  These are the steps we follow when creating content for DreamScene internally.  If you were curious, or are trying to roll your own, this may be a good starting point. 

Hope this was helpful… and if not you can always send me flame mail by using the link to the right :(. Compliments are also always welcome :) :)