Hi zblip,
 
You may have misunderstood. We don't assume music to film users don't want to move the video.
We chose MF because many more users wanted to use MPEG4 and other codecs which aren't supported in Dshow out of the box. So we chose MF as a default and documented how to switch in the help. It was more clearly spelled out when we released this in X3 but I agree with you that this could be more clear. We were hoping that Microsoft would address this more quickly at the time. We'll see what we can do for a future update. Thanks for your feedback. And don't worry we won't be dropping DShow until Microsoft does :)
 
 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not switching... I've been with Cakewalk since Cakewalk Pro Audio 5.0. But I'm pretty sure many other popular DAWs can move a video around the timeline regardless of file format. Unless I'm totally wrong and they can't... and having both a large list of supported video file formats AND the ability to move a video around at the same time is some kind of magical unicorn dream goal that computers in general just can't do yet... 

It has nothing to do with file format. Its the back end API being used that has the limitation. Media foundation has a bug that hangs when we reposition the video. Its a Microsoft Media Foundation limitation that we have reported to them. Since there is no resolution yet, that functionality is disabled. 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
It has nothing to do with file format. Its the back end API being used that has the limitation. Media foundation has a bug that hangs when we reposition the video. Its a Microsoft Media Foundation limitation that we have reported to them. Since there is no resolution yet, that functionality is disabled. 

I understand that, but isn't support of more file formats the whole reason you switched to Media Foundation in the first place? That's what I meant. Unless it was just coincidence that Sonar started supporting more video file formats right when you switched to Media Foundation.

I think that musicians working to picture should league up and push Cakewalk to get there act together and give us the video engine that we deserve.. 

polarbear

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
It has nothing to do with file format. Its the back end API being used that has the limitation. Media foundation has a bug that hangs when we reposition the video. Its a Microsoft Media Foundation limitation that we have reported to them. Since there is no resolution yet, that functionality is disabled. 

I understand that, but isn't support of more file formats the whole reason you switched to Media Foundation in the first place? That's what I meant. Unless it was just coincidence that Sonar started supporting more video file formats right when you switched to Media Foundation.

We switched to MF for two reasons. DirectShow is not supported by Microsoft any more and MF had much more expanded support for newer video codecs. What we didn't expect was that the sequencing aspect of their internal video API doesnt work properly. We have been in conversation with them and we'll address it whenever they fix it on their end. Its really not within our control beyond that. In the interim switching to the Dshow engine is the simplest solution if you rely on this as documented in the help. We may also choose to switch the default to DShow to avoid confusion.

So glad this thread got posted. Was going crazy re-rendering my video to AVI, Quicktime, WMV and it simply would not play in Sonar. Changing to DirectShow fixed it.

I don't know why Sonar Platinum defaults to the Media Foundation Engine for video playback and why the INI file variable isn't in "Advanced" options. 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
We switched to MF for two reasons. DirectShow is not supported by Microsoft any more and MF had much more expanded support for newer video codecs. What we didn't expect was that the sequencing aspect of their internal video API doesnt work properly. 

I'm sure they'll have legacy support for DirectShow for a decade or so, even if they don't endorse it -- and they'll probably take 5 years to fix the bugs in its replacement. It is unfortunate that you get burned expecting the feature set to behave as-represented.