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56-573: Both MovieCDs and the MotionPixels codec remain an issue today in that medium market availability of MovieCDs remained until around the year 2000 and some of the above-mentioned video games still have a cult following, both producing malfunctions in modern PCs due to the outdated MotionPixels codec. The MotionPixels (MP) codec used on MovieCDs originated with the Huygen codec developed by Christian Huygen, David Whipple, and Darrell Smith. The MP codec offered

112-470: A System.alt hive because NTLDR on those versions of Windows can process the System.log file to bring up to date a System hive that has become inconsistent during a shutdown or crash. In addition, the %SystemRoot%\Repair folder contains a copy of the system's registry hives that were created after installation and the first successful startup of Windows. Each registry data file has an associated file with

168-524: A 486 processor or higher, at least 8 MB of RAM, and a 2x-speed CD-ROM drive (most MovieCDs had a data rate of about 280-300 kB/sec). MovieCDs had a running time of about 45 minutes each, so feature films often were stored on two or three discs in one box, and the consumer had to swap discs to watch the whole movie. The codec avoided digital compression artifacts such as the pixelization or block artifacts (seen in VCDs using MPEG-1 ) by treating areas of

224-458: A color look up table (CLUT, or palette) when in high color mode, because there are enough available colors per pixel to represent graphics and photos reasonably satisfactorily. However, the lack of precision decreases image fidelity; as a result, some image formats (e.g., TIFF ) can save paletted 16-bit images with an embedded CLUT. Windows registry The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for

280-545: A roaming profile , then this file will be copied to and from a server at logout and login respectively. A second user-specific registry file named UsrClass.dat contains COM registry entries and does not roam by default. Windows NT systems store the registry in a binary file format which can be exported, loaded and unloaded by the Registry Editor in these operating systems. The following system registry files are stored in %SystemRoot%\System32\config\ : The following file

336-478: A text file or binary file , often located in a shared location that did not provide user-specific settings in a multi-user scenario. By contrast, the Windows Registry stores all application settings in one logical repository (but a number of discrete files) and in a standardized form. According to Microsoft , this offers several advantages over .INI files. Since file parsing is done much more efficiently with

392-541: A ".log" extension that acts as a transaction log that is used to ensure that any interrupted updates can be completed upon next startup. Internally, Registry files are split into 4  kB "bins" that contain collections of "cells". The registry files are stored in the %WINDIR% directory under the names USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT with the addition of CLASSES.DAT in Windows ME. Also, each user profile (if profiles are enabled) has its own USER.DAT file which

448-487: A "key". The terms are a holdout from the 16-bit registry in Windows 3, in which registry keys could not contain arbitrary name/data pairs, but rather contained only one unnamed value (which had to be a string). In this sense, the Windows 3 registry was like a single associative array, in which the keys (in the sense of both 'registry key' and 'associative array key') formed a hierarchy, and the registry values were all strings. When

504-410: A 256-color palette (with bits 8 through 14 remaining unused.) This enabled display of (comparatively) high-quality color images side by side with palette-animated screen elements, but in practice, this feature was hardly used by any software. When all 16 bits are used, one of the components (usually green with RGB565, see below) gets an extra bit, allowing 64 levels of intensity for that component, and

560-407: A backup of the registry be performed before the change. When a program is removed from control panel, it may not be completely removed and, in case of errors or glitches caused by references to missing programs, the user might have to manually check inside directories such as program files. After this, the user might need to manually remove any reference to the uninstalled program in the registry. This

616-471: A binary format, it may be read from or written to more quickly than a text INI file. Furthermore, strongly typed data can be stored in the registry, as opposed to the text information stored in .INI files. This is a benefit when editing keys manually using regedit.exe , the built-in Windows Registry Editor. Because user-based registry settings are loaded from a user-specific path rather than from

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672-402: A binary value of 001010, or 10 on a scale from 0 to 63 (15.9%). Because of this, the colour RGB (40, 40, 40) will have a slight purplish ( magenta ) tinge when displayed in 16 bits. 40 on a scale from 0 to 255 is 15.7%. Other 24-bit colours would incur a green tinge when subsampled: for instance, the 24-bit RGB representation of 14.1% grey, i.e. (36, 36, 36), would be encoded as 4/31 (12.9%) on

728-486: A numeric constant) defining how to parse this data. The standard types are: The keys at the root level of the hierarchical database are generally named by their Windows API definitions, which all begin "HKEY". They are frequently abbreviated to a three- or four-letter short name starting with "HK" (e.g. HKCU and HKLM). Technically, they are predefined handles (with known constant values) to specific keys that are either maintained in memory, or stored in hive files stored in

784-435: A program is installed, a new subkey containing settings such as a program's location, its version, and how to start the program, are all added to the Windows Registry. When introduced with Windows 3.1 , the Windows Registry primarily stored configuration information for COM -based components. Windows 95 and Windows NT extended its use to rationalize and centralize the information in the profusion of INI files , which held

840-491: A read-only system location, the registry allows multiple users to share the same machine, and also allows programs to work for less privileged users. Backup and restoration is also simplified as the registry can be accessed over a network connection for remote management/support, including from scripts, using the standard set of APIs , as long as the Remote Registry service is running and firewall rules permit this. Because

896-464: A resolution of 320x236 pixels, 16-bit high color , and 16 frames per second fullscreen playback at a datarate of (in theory) up to about 520 kB/sec, without having to install MPEG or acquire additional hardware, on Microsoft Windows systems from Windows 3.x on. Audio was saved in plain WAV format. Its FourCC code was, depending on version, "MVI1" or "MVI2." For viewing MovieCDs, Sirius recommended

952-412: A syntax similar to Windows' path names, using backslashes to indicate levels of hierarchy. Keys must have a case insensitive name without backslashes. The hierarchy of registry keys can only be accessed from a known root key handle (which is anonymous but whose effective value is a constant numeric handle) that is mapped to the content of a registry key preloaded by the kernel from a stored "hive", or to

1008-426: A total of 131 titles released, offering genres such as action, comedy, anime , computer animation and music performance. High color High color graphics is a method of storing image information in a computer 's memory such that each pixel is represented by two bytes . Usually the color is represented by all 16 bits , but some devices also support 15-bit high color. In Windows 7 , Microsoft used

1064-430: A total of 65536 available colors. This can lead to small discrepancies in encoding, e.g. when one wishes to encode the 24-bit colour RGB (40, 40, 40) with 16 bits (a problem common to subsampling ). Forty in binary is 00101000. The red and blue channels will take the five most significant bits, and will have a value of 00101, or 5 on a scale from 0 to 31 (16.1%). The green channel, with six bits of precision, will have

1120-535: A value (and its data), the values to be removed must have a minus sign ("-") after the equal sign ("="). For example, to remove only the "Value A" and "Value B" values (and their data) from the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Foobar key: To remove only the Default value of the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Foobar (and its data): Lines beginning with a semicolon are considered comments: Windows group policies can change registry keys for

1176-509: Is created each time the system boots and performs hardware detection. Individual settings for users on a system are stored in a hive (disk file) per user. During user login, the system loads the user hive under the HKEY_USERS key and sets the HKCU (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) symbolic reference to point to the current user. This allows applications to store/retrieve settings for the current user implicitly under

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1232-534: Is installed. As soon as any version of the MotionPixels codec Windows version MVI2 is installed on any post-Win98 Windows OS, any video and audio-editing software on the same system may crash as soon as a codec-choosing dialogue for saving a file is opened. Additionally, players might be unable to read a variety of other audio and video codecs, and a variety of other both software and hardware-related video problems might occur, such as TV-cards ceasing to function. Running MotionPixels's uninstall routine that only removes

1288-448: Is located in the user's profile directory in %WINDIR%\Profiles\<Username>\ . The only registry file is called REG.DAT and it is stored in the %WINDIR% directory. To access the registry files, the device needs to be set in a special mode using either:  If any of the above methods worked, the device's registry files can be found in the following location: The registry contains important configuration information for

1344-493: Is not required to use an application. Abbreviated HKLM, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE stores settings that are specific to the local computer. The key located by HKLM is actually not stored on disk, but maintained in memory by the system kernel in order to map all the other subkeys. Applications cannot create any additional subkeys. On Windows NT, this key contains four subkeys, "SAM", "SECURITY", "SYSTEM", and "SOFTWARE", that are loaded at boot time within their respective files located in

1400-503: Is stored in .REG files using the following syntax: The Default Value of a key can be edited by using "@" instead of "Value Name": String values do not require a <Value type> (see example), but backslashes ('\') need to be written as a double-backslash ('\\'), and quotes ('"') as backslash-quote ('\"'). For example, to add the values "Value A", "Value B", "Value C", "Value D", "Value E", "Value F", "Value G", "Value H", "Value I", "Value J", "Value K", "Value L", and "Value M" to

1456-417: Is stored in each user's profile folder: For Windows 2000, Server 2003 and Windows XP, the following additional user-specific file is used for file associations and COM information: For Windows Vista and later, the path was changed to: Windows 2000 keeps an alternate copy of the registry hives (.ALT) and attempts to switch to it when corruption is detected. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 do not maintain

1512-412: Is usually done by using RegEdit.exe. Editing the registry is sometimes necessary when working around Windows-specific issues e.g. problems when logging onto a domain can be resolved by editing the registry. Windows Registry can be edited manually using programs such as RegEdit.exe, although these tools do not expose some of the registry's metadata such as the last modified date. The registry editor for

1568-570: The Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel , device drivers , services , Security Accounts Manager , and user interfaces can all use the registry. The registry also allows access to counters for profiling system performance. In other words, the registry or Windows Registry contains information, settings, options, and other values for programs and hardware installed on all versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. For example, when

1624-445: The %SystemRoot%\System32\config\ folder. A fifth subkey, "HARDWARE", is volatile and is created dynamically, and as such is not stored in a file (it exposes a view of all the currently detected Plug-and-Play devices). On Windows Vista and above, a sixth and seventh subkey, "COMPONENTS" and "BCD", are mapped in memory by the kernel on-demand and loaded from %SystemRoot%\System32\config\COMPONENTS or from boot configuration data, \boot\BCD on

1680-486: The 3.1/95 series of operating systems is RegEdit.exe and for Windows NT it is RegEdt32.exe; the functionalities are merged in Windows XP. Optional and third-party tools similar to RegEdit.exe are available for many Windows CE versions. Registry Editor allows users to perform the following functions: .REG files (also known as Registration entries) are text-based human-readable files for exporting and importing portions of

1736-418: The 32-bit registry was created, so was the additional capability of creating multiple named values per key, and the meanings of the names were somewhat distorted. For compatibility with the previous behavior, each registry key may have a "default" value, whose name is the empty string. Each value can store arbitrary data with variable length and encoding, but which is associated with a symbolic type (defined as

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1792-403: The HKCU key. Not all hives are loaded at any one time. At boot time, only a minimal set of hives are loaded, and after that, hives are loaded as the operating system initializes and as users log in or whenever a hive is explicitly loaded by an application. The registry is physically stored in several files, which are generally obfuscated from the user-mode APIs used to manipulate the data inside

1848-435: The HKLM\SOFTWARE\Foobar key: Data from .REG files can be added/merged with the registry by double-clicking these files or using the /s switch in the command line. REG files can also be used to remove registry data. To remove a key (and all subkeys, values and data), the key name must be preceded by a minus sign ("-"). For example, to remove the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Foobar key (and all subkeys, values and data), To remove

1904-675: The MotionPixels Player, not the codec itself, and not even Windows Control Panel can be used to de-install the MP codec, so the only way to get rid of it and reclaim a working system is to manually delete any single file containing the letters MVI in the Windows registry and the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory. The catalogue of both TV and feature film programs available on MovieCDs mostly spawned from deals with New Line Home Video , Anchor Bay , Alliance , Trimark , Rhino , and Central Park Media , with

1960-590: The Win32 API, or by synonymous abbreviations (depending on applications): Like other files and services in Windows, all registry keys may be restricted by access control lists (ACLs), depending on user privileges, or on security tokens acquired by applications, or on system security policies enforced by the system (these restrictions may be predefined by the system itself, and configured by local system administrators or by domain administrators). Different users, programs, services or remote systems may only see some parts of

2016-449: The codec was still a pre- DirectX artifact, even though they can even be played with any other video players on Windows 95 and Windows 98 once the MP codec is installed. On Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, MP's NT version awarent.exe is needed. MP videos run stable on these Windows versions, and the codec can even be used to encode own videos into MotionPixels files, however serious other issues arise no matter which version of MVI2

2072-415: The configurations for individual programs, and were stored at various locations. It is not a requirement for Windows applications to use the Windows Registry. For example, .NET Framework applications use XML files for configuration, while portable applications usually keep their configuration files with their executables . Prior to the Windows Registry, . INI files stored each program's settings as

2128-486: The content of a subkey within another root key, or mapped to a registered service or DLL that provides access to its contained subkeys and values. E.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows refers to the subkey "Windows" of the subkey "Microsoft" of the subkey "Software" of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE root key. There are seven predefined root keys, traditionally named according to their constant handles defined in

2184-560: The form of Sirius's MovieCDs and many third-party video games (such as the Caesar series by Sierra ). MVI2 came in three versions: Given the dominance of the VCD and DVD formats, MovieCD never gained a significant following. All MovieCDs had the MVI2 codec on them ready to install, and most video games with them installed both codec and player without asking the user. Both are still an issue today due to

2240-488: The frame as objects rather than dividing it into blocks. Its output was always RGB; however, the viewer could choose between different settings of chroma subsampling for encoding, from RGB through YCrCb 4:2:2 all the way to 16:1:1 which ensured for low datarates at what were high resolutions at the time, while a particularly low chroma subsampling made for a distinctively analogue video look to today's eyes, with spatially (not temporally) smeared colors and sharp luma . MVI1

2296-427: The hierarchy or distinct hierarchies from the same root keys. Registry values are name/data pairs stored within keys. Registry values are referenced separately from registry keys. Each registry value stored in a registry key has a unique name whose letter case is not significant. The Windows API functions that query and manipulate registry values take value names separately from the key path or handle that identifies

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2352-400: The individual shades of green relatively easily, while the shades of red should be difficult to see, and the shades of blue are likely indistinguishable. More rarely, some systems support having the extra bit of colour depth on the red or blue channel, usually in applications where that colour is more prevalent (photographing of skin tones or skies, for example). There is generally no need for

2408-603: The local filesystem and loaded by the system kernel at boot time and then shared (with various access rights) between all processes running on the local system, or loaded and mapped in all processes started in a user session when the user logs on the system. The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (local machine-specific configuration data) and HKEY_CURRENT_USER (user-specific configuration data) nodes have a similar structure to each other; user applications typically look up their settings by first checking for them in "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Vendor's name\Application's name\Version\Setting name", and if

2464-423: The operating system, for installed applications as well as individual settings for each user and application. A careless change to the operating system configuration in the registry could cause irreversible damage, so it is usually only installer programs which perform changes to the registry database during installation/configuration and removal. If a user wants to edit the registry manually, Microsoft recommends that

2520-464: The parent key. Registry values may contain backslashes in their names, but doing so makes them difficult to distinguish from their key paths when using some legacy Windows Registry API functions (whose usage is deprecated in Win32). The terminology is somewhat misleading, as each registry key is similar to an associative array , where standard terminology would refer to the name part of each registry value as

2576-535: The red and blue channels, but 9/63 (14.3%) on the green channel, because 36 is represented as 00100100 in binary. Green is usually chosen for the extra bit in 16 bits because the human eye has its highest sensitivity for green shades. For a demonstration, look closely at the following picture (note: this will work only on monitors displaying true color , i.e., 24 or 32 bits) where dark shades of red, green and blue are shown using 128 levels of intensities for each component (7 bits). Readers with normal vision should see

2632-655: The registry by means of the Kernel Transaction Manager , extending the atomicity guarantees across multiple key or value changes with traditional commit–abort semantics. (Note however that NTFS provides such support for the file system as well, so the same guarantees could, in theory, be obtained with traditional configuration files.) The registry contains two basic elements: keys and values . Registry keys are container objects similar to folders. Registry values are non-container objects similar to files. Keys may contain values and subkeys. Keys are referenced with

2688-499: The registry is a database, it offers improved system integrity with features such as atomic updates . If two processes attempt to update the same registry value at the same time, one process's change will precede the other's and the overall consistency of the data will be maintained. Where changes are made to .INI files, such race conditions can result in inconsistent data that does not match either attempted update. Windows Vista and later operating systems provide transactional updates to

2744-545: The registry using an INI -based syntax. On Windows 2000 and later, they contain the string Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 at the beginning, while on Windows 9x and NT 4.0 systems, they contain the string REGEDIT4 . Windows 2000 and later REG files are Unicode -based, while on Windows 9x and NT 4.0 systems, they are ANSI -based. Windows 9x format .REG files are compatible with Windows 2000 and later. The Registry Editor on Windows on these systems also supports exporting .REG files in Windows 9x/NT format. Data

2800-506: The registry. Depending upon the version of Windows, there will be different files and different locations for these files, but they are all on the local machine. The location for system registry files in Windows NT is %SystemRoot%\System32\config\ ; the user-specific HKEY_CURRENT_USER user registry hive is stored in Ntuser.dat inside the user profile. There is one of these per user; if a user has

2856-408: The setting is not found, look instead in the same location under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key. However, the converse may apply for administrator-enforced policy settings where HKLM may take precedence over HKCU. The Windows Logo Program has specific requirements for where different types of user data may be stored, and that the concept of least privilege be followed so that administrator-level access

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2912-424: The system partition. Even though the registry presents itself as an integrated hierarchical database, branches of the registry are actually stored in a number of disk files called hives . (The word hive constitutes an in-joke .) Some hives are volatile and are not stored on disk at all. An example of this is the hive of the branch starting at HKLM\HARDWARE. This hive records information about system hardware and

2968-407: The term high color to identify display systems that can make use of more than 8-bits per color channel (10:10:10:2 or 16:16:16:16 rendering formats) from traditional 8-bit per color channel formats. This is a different and distinct usage from the 15-bit (5:5:5) or 16-bit (5:6:5) formats traditionally associated with the phrase high color ; see deep color . In 15-bit high color, one of the bits of

3024-675: The two bytes is ignored or set aside for an alpha channel , and the remaining 15 bits are split between the red , green , and blue components of the final color. Each of the RGB components has 5 bits associated, giving 2⁵ = 32 intensities of each component. This allows 32768 possible colors for each pixel. The popular Cirrus Logic graphics chips of the early 1990s made use of the spare high-order bit for their so-called "mixed" video modes: with bit 15 clear, bits 0 through 14 would be treated as an RGB value as described above, while with bit 15 set, bit 0 through 7 would be interpreted as an 8-bit index into

3080-412: The wide availability of MovieCDs until around 2000 and the cult following some of these games still have. Both versions of the MP codec installing executable for Windows remain available on the web from third-party downloading sites for free manually as well as within codec packs. The codec's Windows 3.x and 95 version still runs more or less on Windows 98; however the videos often crash as this version of

3136-534: Was a purely DOS-based codec, carrying its animations in an .MVI container . Apparently, the only occasion it was ever used was with Sirius's game Treasure Quest . MVI2 was the Windows incarnation of the MotionPixels codec, and always came with its own player, the MotionPixels Movie Player. MVI2 files used the AVI container still popular today. It saw international distribution during the mid- to late-1990s in

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