[FIXED] Wallpaper is poorly recompressed when set - Forum «Technical Support»

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Topic: «[FIXED] Wallpaper is poorly recompressed when set » on forum: Technical Support

Paul Accisano
Registered user

Posts: 2
Joined: 11/10/2011

Posted: 11/10/2011 22:30:09

Technically this is a bug in Windows 7, however, there are known workarounds and I would love it if you could implement one of them.

There is a known problem in Windows 7 (which MS has yet to address and at this point probably never will) where, when you set a wallpaper image that is anything other than a jpg, the image is recompressed behind the scenes as a horribly lossy jpg before being applied. For photographs this isn't really noticeable, but for vector graphics or drawings it introduces an unbearable amount of compression artifacts. You can read about the problem here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproui/thread/0c02f2cb-39cd-4f2d-bd4e-154fd2165b69
or just google "windows 7 wallpaper compression"

There are two main workarounds: one is to save the wallpaper as a .jpg with minimum compression, as Windows will not convert images that are already jpgs. The other is to use the "Set as Desktop Wallpaper" feature of most web browsers. Apparently this bypasses the recompression somehow.

However, when AMM sets the wallpaper, the composited wallpapers are stored as bmps (ironically I assume to make them lossless) and applied using the standard method which causes them to be recompressed. As I have been cursed with a good eye for compression artifacts, this makes the Wallpaper feature useless to me. It would be great of AMM could work around this bug and either save the composited wallpapers as minimum-compression jpgs or figure out what method the "Set as Desktop Wallpaper" uses and use that to set the wallpaper.

Thanks