Progress at last

Did a lot of research around the magicweb, it seems that there is a lot of expertise and experience out there re WMC. What I observe is that there is an awful lot of searching but not much finding on the web and the Microsoft MVP's don't seem to be much help in many cases.  Anyway I tried a lot of options with the diffent packages and I had an extensive look at the Intel Graphics HD4000 control GUI. It is not fantastic by any means and Intels own support forums reveals a lot of frustration with users of the product. I tried a number of options and solved the SD distortion by moving to custom scaling.

There seem to be issues with DVB-T2 HD transmission in the UK and the ability of PC graphics to cope with it. There is mention of a"29/59" frame rate issue where the transmitted stream carries with it data about the frame rate and should there be a problem with this then the PC graphics will not respond quickly enough resulting in glitching of one form or another. I went back to the settings and disabled all of the bells and whistle settings and this seemed to do the trick. The HD channels have played OK ever since, but lets wait and see.

The final task was to load up the final photos, videos etc. What a nightmare this turned into. It started because some of the  photos were oriented wrongly and I need to rotate them. Tried this WMC but without much success. WMC said it was unable to do this, muttering about unable to save the file.

I looked using trusty Picasa and could rotate but not save. Windows explorer offers the facilty to rotate under right mouse click, but said no joy the file is read only or in use with some other idiot program. This little benign statement started a war with  Windows security systems - whata tangled web that weaves?

Checked read only - yup folder had a little blue button on read only. Selected this to switch off "read only" applied to all file folders sub folders etc. Went back and tried to rotate - no joy. Went back to folder - read only still in force. Tried again with no more success. Looked at the files themselves, all looked to be not read only! Still could not rotate - same message. Now looked at share and security settings - mind numbing Looke at the users including system accounts - gave full permissions. I had already moved away from Windows 7 inbuilt system and moved to what I was more familiar with since NT days. None of this gave any greater success. Re-booted to clear any lingering program holds on the files. Still no better. Back to the interweb. Some opinion was to resort to the old DOS style commands (CMD) and use the attrib command. Well, after sorting out the syntax - do you know what to do with spaces in the folder names? - that run OK, but still no rotation. I tried various thing on a photo file and I finally got a hint that UAC was tangling with me. It wasn't popping up any you need Admin approval type boxes. User Account Control is the system that seeks permission to change things. Well I switched UAC off and all the problems went away. I don't really understand why I had the problem, my laptop has Win 7 and I have never experienced this sort of problem before. I am not the only one suffering if you have a look at the web.

All sorted now and handed over to DB to test.