April 20, 2005

KB Articles and Patches

May I make a request of the people who release patches for Windows? Have a knowledge base article available at the same time you release the patch.

Right now, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 has this patch available.

From looking at the filename, it's fairly obvious that the accompanying KB article is #894553. However, that KB article is nowhere to be found, at least as of this writing. Even trying a direct link to where it should be leads nowhere.

I write this because right now, my Media Center works fine. Aside from occasionally recoding shows in higher quality than it should, it works okay. I don't want to install an update on a functioning machine without knowing what side effects are going to be there, if other fixes are rolled in with it, or exactly what the problem is that the update is supposed to cure.

The current description is vague to say the least. "The Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Create DVD Update enables increased reliability when creating a video DVD using recorded TV files (.dvr-ms)." So what was the problem that was causing the unreliability. Will the update affect any work I'm doing on Media Center plug-ins? Were API's changed?

So please, Microsoft, tell us. Exactly what is affected by this update?

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