Black square sometimes appears instead of album art in media cente

My new laptop is running what i guess is media center 2005, and what i know
is wmp11.

I have no problems with wmp11, with all album art assigned correctly etc.
However, sometimes when playing music through media center (which i prefer to
use due to its interface), while the album art CAN always be seen, on
pressing play it becomes a black square. Then when the next song of say a
playlist starts, the album art for that is also just a black square. Though
sometimes it will change to the correct art when a new song starts. And a
third variation is that the album art showing stays the same for the next
song (even though its a diff album), while the information changes. ie say
the 'beatles-love me do' is playing, when finished it will go to a rolling
stones song and show the info for this, but the album cover would still be
the beatles.

Sorry if thats a bit long winded, but those variations are i think all part
of the same problem. Wmp11 is fine, and i'm thinking it may be a memory issue
because media center seems to require a bit more power to run? Or maybe cos
i'm running visualisations (hard to test this because the problem happens
frequently but randomly). Thanks in advance

 

This is a well documented problem in Media Center Edition caused by Internet
Explorer 7 (IE7). I had the same problem when I upgraded to IE7, rolling
back to IE6 will fix this issue. I think that it has something to do with
songs with embedded album art. ( but I'm not 100% sure). If you do a quick
google search, you see that microsoft has instructions for how to roll back
to IE6. Also, if you search these newsgroups you'll see others with the same
issue.

What gets me is that there's been no word from MS when and if they'll fix
this problem. There are tons of media players out there that have figured
this out, why can't the biggest software company in world get this right?

Good Luck!

 

How is it documented? What's the SR number?

I haven't heard of this, so I'm interested in whatever explanation you've
heard here....

 

I have a similar problem with WMP11. Occasionally it displays a black square
for album art, and looking at the directory there is a hidden folder.jpg. I
can replace this, but I don't know why these black squares occasionally
appear.

 

Well, when I said documented, I didn't mean by microsoft (that's the part
that annoys me). Instead here's a google search result
http://www.google.com/search?source...2,GGGL:en&q=media+center+2005+black+album+art

And if you search these newsgroups you get the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...-8EB7A22FC6A0&dglist=&ptlist=&exp=&sloc=en-us

 

You are right that IE 7 changes something in the way images are processed. I
have, for 10+ years, in order to create a screenshot for web pages, done a
screen capture by pressing ALT-PrintScreen and then pasted that image into
Microsoft ImageComposer and then saved the image as PNG.

Suddenly, when I installed IE7, this process broke. All my screenshots
started showing up as black squares. The word from Microsoft product support
on my issue was that IE6 and before didn't handle PNGs, only IE7 does so I
must surely be mistaken about what I had done for 10 years.

Anyway, I had to download Gimp to handle my pictures and I was back to
working.

While my problem relates specifically to published changes in how Microsoft
handles PNG images, I would guess that DLLs were replaced that are used to
handle all images and in the process other image related issues could have
been introduced.

I haven't been following these groups long enough to know the history on
this one but with Zach also stating he's never heard of this problem before,
it does indicate that the timing of this issue is at least coincidental.


Dale

 

It's definitely related to IE7. When I rolled back to IE6 everything worked
great again. I didn't have to do anything else but the rollback. Now I use
firefox for tab browsing.

Though I haven't heard of this happening to WMP11 before, only MCE2005. If
you go to www.thegreenbutton.com you'll also see a few comments on this
issue. And from the google search link that I posted above, you'll see that
Chris Lanier has posted about this on his blog.

 

I run XP sp2, IE6
Never had MCE or IE7 on my machine but still had album art replaced by black
squares.
Only happened when I first upgraded to WMP11. I fixed the art up and it
hasn't happened since - shhhhhh...
Regards
Dave

 

It is certainly not unheard of for several packages from Microsoft to update
the same file or system DLL.

 

Then you were bullshitted. IE6 supports viewing of PNG, but it has
problems with Alpha Transparency features of PNG (hence pngfix.js
files popping up everywhere to apply DirectX filters through CSS
instead).

Non-transparent PNGs, or PNGs using binary transparency masking like
GIFs cause no apparent problem. And yes, it finally went away in IE7.

Chapter and verse on this update is available here, which doesn't
require invoking majickal DLL changes

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmassy/archive/2004/08/05/209428.aspx
http://alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/

Cheers - Neil