Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Add video from your networked storage into Movie Maker

Windows Live Movie Maker, having started off as a glass hammer, has made significant strides in the areas of functionality and usability. If you haven’t already pushed all the buttons in the new release, I recommend you check out Paul’s thorough review.Bozo. What were you thinking?

While playing around with Movie Maker, I tried to import some video content stored on my HP MediaSmart. Just my luck, it’s not supported. As you can plainly see on the right, Microsoft suggests I copy my content – which could theoretically be gigabytes in size – to my local disk.

Uh. How about no?

Poking around a bit, I noticed Movie Maker has an undocumented override switch... but it comes at a tiny cost: The network share housing your media must may need to allow unfettered Guest access. For those that aren’t trying to hide porn on their MediaSmart servers, this isn’t a big deal. I suspect this is either a temporary code issue revolving around the lack of user impersonation or a security feature. Either case, it’s annoying.

(Update August 21, 2009: Tom Warren mentioned he did not require Guest access. YMMV.)

To run the roadblock, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Movie Maker and add a DWORD value named AllowNetworkFiles. Afterwards, simply double-click it and set its data to either 0 (disabled) or 1 (enabled).

It works!

Keyboard cat, inside the new Windows Live Movie Maker, playing me off.

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