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At the Computex event in May last year, Microsoft’s executive vice president (EVP) and chief product officer Panos Panay said that maintaining the high quality of Windows 11 is the company’s top priority. And although not explicitly stated, it seems that Microsoft certainly intends to do so as it continues to update its driver evaluation process.
Garrett Duchene, Microsoft’s principal program manager, recently published a Tech Community blog post outlining the company’s latest improvements to audio and display driver diagnostics. The new driver evaluation method will look for Software Digital Rights Management (SWDRM) catalog reload events, which are associated with driver timeout issues during playback of software-based DRM content on Netflix and other similar applications. will help to solve
In a document titled “Percentage of SWDRM playback devices that initiated a catalog reload event,” Microsoft Explains:
Devices that experience code integrity catalog reloading when loading binaries. mfpmp.exe, can get timeouts from Netflix and other applications. This “device-based” measurement is used to achieve this scenario.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) techniques (software or hardware) are used during video playback on Windows devices. We use the set of all devices with SWDRM playback as our sample space to calculate percentages.
In addition, the company is also trying to better account for audio processing object or APO (software-based digital signal processing) crashing, as current methods measure audio crash for some time on driver submission. May cause it to fail. This is explained in the document titled “Percentage of machines with at least one APO failure in the last 7 days” where Microsoft Says that:
When audio APOs crash at least 10 times in a row, the audio service disables further use of the APO so that the suer has an error-free audio experience. This can result in our audio crash measure failing for a period of time on a driver submission and then resuming when the APO causing the issue on that driver submission is disabled. This metric tracks APO disablement over the past 7 days compared to devices using audio on that day (audio client initialize event).
While Microsoft continues its efforts to improve Windows drivers, there are issues that often fall under the radar. Such problems are sometimes related to Multiplane Overlay (MPO), a feature that causes various display-related issues on Windows 11 as well as Windows 10, where disabling it often causes a variety of bugs. Can be fine. These bugs include white mouse cursor, black screen, white screen, stuttering, and flickering.
