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RSS feedsI got an error message saying: “Windows Movie Maker cannot be used with Remote Desktop Connection or Terminal Services”.
Task Manager and Windows Movie Maker (WMM) are two programs I use all the time.
Because Windows Movie Maker is a demanding bit of software, I run it on my fastest PC, which is my dual-core Athlon. And I’m very happy with it, so I was surprised when I tried to run it and was told it doesn’t work.
Well, that’s not true. I use WMM all the time via Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) and it runs just fine. True, if you want to play video, the frame rate is not good; the data can’t be transferred across the remote desktop protocol (RDP) fast enough to make it look like a moving image. But so what? You don’t use WMM to watch video, you use it to edit clips.
The situation is quite straightforward. If I start WMM while sitting at the Athlon machine and then go downstairs to my Tablet PC, I can log in via RDC and the movie editor continues to run. But if I log in first and then try to run WMM, it checks to see if it’s allowed. And it isn’t.
Experiments show a similar experience with Task Manager. It runs fine over RDC, but you can’t invoke it remotely, which is a pain because I often need to manage the Windows Terminal Server to close down broken software. Having to go home first, start up Task Manager and then close down unresponding software is a disaster, especially when I’m logged in from Taiwan.
I sent a request for an explanation to Microsoft and then I queried a couple of software engineers. “Access to the YUV space” said one, loftily. He went on to explain: “The video playout is only local to the machine same reason you can’t watch DVDs over RDC.”
Nope. If that were true, I couldn’t see the software running once it was launched, I pointed out. Another programmer explained that the system does a check for resources. “If it doesn’t see the appropriate resources at startup, then it can’t open them and it can’t start... the fact that you can use it over RDC is just luck that you are in a marginal case.”
Actually, no again. It won’t start up, whether I’m on a 1Gbit/sec Ethernet connection, or on a Vodafone 3G wireless link. But, in either case, it performs just fine once it has been launched.
And here’s the thing. If you try to run Windows Media Player it launches without complaint. Now, while WMM doesn’t need to run video, the media player does and audio as well. And I have to tell you that Media Player over RDC sucks like a vacuum at both! The sound is jerky, delayed and not good; the video well, what do you expect? Not miracles, for sure. If the test is ‘to see appropriate resources’, then Media Player needs far more of them. But it just works over RDC, even though it works badly. No messages about “cannot be used”. And anyway, it’s my choice, surely, if I want to run an application, not Redmond’s.
Why can’t WMM just put up a dialogue saying: “This application has not been tested over RDC and may cause instability. Run? [yes] [no]” and leave the choice to me?
“Because it creates a support issue, if the application fails in unexpected ways and leaves it in an unusual configuration, or corrupts data, or whatever.” Well, sure, but the same applies to Media Player.
The official word from Microsoft is: “Movie Maker is unsupported in an RDP session and there is no workaround to launch Movie Maker within an RDP session. This behaviour is by design.”
At this point, my sense of humour wore thin. The question is why they decided WMM should not work. “It’s a standalone tool, it isn’t intended to work remotely,” offered the support guy, feebly. In which case, why does it work?
Time was, when if you pointed out an anomaly of this sort to Redmond, an eager developer would say: “Wow you’re right. We’ll check if there’s really a problem about this and try to do an update next release.”
These days, you get a jobsworth explaining that it won’t work because it breaks the rules. When did Microsoft stop being a developer and become a ticket sales bureaucracy?
This article appeared in the February 2008 edition of PCW.
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