FastPictureViewer Codec vs WHS 2011 on Win8

[deputy963]

Hello Alex!

Great piece of software you've written and it has served me well through both Vista and Win 7. However I recently installed Win8 RTM and the final piece of my puzzle was to install the connector software for my Windows Home Server 2011 - this is a bit of code that allows the client to communicate with the server.

After a reboot the Launchpad, which is the actual program that runs in the background for WHS, would error out at startup with "Windows Home Server Launchpad has stopped working". I initially thought it was related to the version of .Net that is native to Win 8, but after I started looking at logs I found this...

LaunchPad: !!!!FATAL: Launchpad shutting down due to unhandled exception: Operation caused an invalid state.

Followed by...

Message: Operation caused an invalid state.
Stack: at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapDecoder.SetupDecoderFromUriOrStream(Uri uri, Stream stream, BitmapCacheOption cacheOption, Guid& clsId, Boolean& isOriginalWritable, Stream& uriStream, UnmanagedMemoryStream& unmanagedMemoryStream, SafeFileHandle& safeFilehandle)
at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapDecoder.CreateFromUriOrStream(Uri baseUri, Uri uri, Stream stream, BitmapCreateOptions createOptions, BitmapCacheOption cacheOption, RequestCachePolicy uriCachePolicy, Boolean insertInDecoderCache)
at Microsoft.WindowsServerSolutions.Common.ImageConversionHelper.GetBitmapSource(Image bitmapImage)

Which caused me to look into what I had installed that affected images. FastPictureViewer Codec. I uninstalled FPVC and the launchpad immediately started working. Unfortunately I am now unable to view my RAW files. Any ideas?

[Axel]

Our package ships with a special codec called CHDK which is not installed by default because it may cause conflicts with some applications.

[deputy963]

I wasn't aware of that. I did re-install with only the Canon RAW codec and everything was fine. I guess I'll create an image, as a fall back, and try to add the others (less CHDK).

Thanks!

[Axel]

The problem with the Canon Hack thing is that the bright minds hacking firwares to dump raw data could not (or forgot to) include any header information in the files. As such the CHDK codec needs to see all files in order to pick those who can possibly come from those hacked cameras. I saw this as a potential avenue for trouble and did not install this particular codec by default. If you don't know what are those CHDK firmwares or don't use them, leave the corresponding codec uninstalled as it is by default!

The default installation of the Codec Pack works perfectly on Windows 8.