WinHEC: Vista Plays Favorites for Music, Video

I just saw a demo of Vista's long-promised ability to favor multimedia playback so that music and video will play smoothly even when your computer is busy running many programs.

Mark Russinovich, of Sysinternals fame and now a Microsoft employee, demonstrated the new functionality by playing music with Windows Media Player first on XP, and then on Vista. On XP, when he simulated a heavy computer load, we heard the skipping and stuttering you'd expect from an extra-busy PC.

But on Vista, the music playback was smooth even when the system was artificially loaded heavily enough so that the mouse moved like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. I haven't tested the feature myself, but the demo made it look like a smart approach.

Vista pulls this off using what's called thread prioritization, where threads (used by programs to perform tasks) for multimedia programs are given priority for using the CPU over non-prioritized threads from other programs. Russinovich said that WMP 11 takes advantage of this prioritization, and that other multimedia apps can do the same using APIs.

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