Removal of Windows Movie Maker

Affected Platforms

Clients - Windows 7
Servers - Windows Server 2008 R2

Feature Impact

Severity - High
Frequency - Medium

Description

Microsoft is deprecating and removing the Windows Movie Maker utility. This includes:

  • All entry points to Windows Movie Maker (for example, Start Menu, Start > Run)
  • All binaries that were used by Windows Movie Maker (everything that was in %ProgramFiles%\Movie Maker)

However, a user's Movie Maker project files will remain on the system and be accessible to other applications that support this file format.

Manifestation

Remove of Windows Movie Maker results in the following:

  • Any attempt to launch Windows Movie Maker with its command line arguments will fail
  • Any plug-ins that were installed to enable new transforms and animations will remain installed but will not be exposed to the end user

Solution

To have such functionality in the future, a user will need to install a similar application from Microsoft or another software provider.