Vista QuickPlay neither quick nor play

September 6, 2007 1:14 PM

Anyone figured out a hack for HP QuickPlay (Direct Mode) on Vista?

For those unfamiliar, or shopping for HP notebooks and want to be fully informed, here's an explanation.

HP offers several notebook models with some extra buttons on the case and an application called QuickPlay.
The idea being that when the computer is powered off, you can press the QuickPlay button and it will launch a QuickPlay media player WITHOUT ACTUALLY BOOTING to the OS. Saves lots of battery power when watching a movie on a plane, etc. Otherwise, it's simply just a kind of crappy media player.

I saw the feature advertised when shopping for an HP Vista machine.
I met someone who had an HP XP machine with QuickPlay, and checked it out.
Poking about, I found a separate partition on the HD for QuickPlay, surely to boot from when coming from a cold start.
How clever!, I thought, and ordered an HP Vista machine.

Little did I know that QP doesn't function that way on Vista machines. Cold machine, press QuickPlay, it goes through booting Vista first, THEN starts QuickPlay; doesn't do anything to powerdown Vista afterwards. Teh sux. Doesn't do the one thing it's good for.

So I (shudder) contact HP support, they say "Yes, that is called QuickPlay Direct mode, and it works in XP, but not in Vista - thank you for your suggestion to get it working in Vista, and have a lovely day!".

Googling just gets me other people complaining about the same issue.

Anyone in the hive mind:

Have this solved?

Have an idea for a hack?

Have a reason why it might not work in Vista, when it does in XP (e.g: the dinguses are no longer framinated in Vista as they were in XP, so it's never going to work on a Vista machine)?

posted by bartleby to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

To piggy back: Anyone know how to reprogam the buttons to do something useful or at least disable the player buttons with disabling the volume controls?
posted by Mitheral at 1:27 PM on September 6, 2007

Have a reason why it might not work in Vista, when it does in XP?
It probably has something to do with Vista's DRM crap. If the OS doesn't boot, it can't validate the media you're trying to view...or something like that. Gotta keep the world safe for the studios, y'know.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:35 PM on September 6, 2007

(This is completely off the top of my head).

In Vista the bootloader changed. My guess is that this is what broke the QuickPlay stuff. I'd assume that the QuickPlay buttons tell the machine to power on and something happens to ensure that the secondary partion is loaded instead of Windows. Changes to the bootloader may prevent this from working.

I'm sorry that I don't really have an idea of a hack. I suppose if you were really gung ho about it you could install Linux or something on a second partition stripped down to just play DVDs.

I doubt this has anything to do with DRM bits added in Vista to support HDDVD and BlueRay.
posted by mge at 2:48 AM on September 7, 2007