Windows 8 and / in file paths

[Zodler]

I have installed Windows 8 and the latest MakeMKV can not make MKVs anymore. I suspect that it's because of file path names.

The strange thing is that MakeMKV sees the file paths with / instead of \. For example I see MakeMKV trying to write
to D:/FOLDER/file.mkv instead of D:\FOLDER\file.mkv!!

Is this the problem? Is this new specific to Windows 8?

[Woodstock]

For Windows NT up through Win7, the operating system itself accepts either / or \ in paths... which is why "/" is an illegal character within a file name. This was for compatibility with Unix programs that might be compiled to run under NT.

The limitation on use of / is when you are dealing with CMD.EXE (think batch files), which was trying to be compatible with COMMAND.COM on DOS... But DOS also accepted / or \, which allowed me to irritate a lot of people back in the "the old days" with a small change to COMMAND.COM's "switch" character setting....

But a command line program CAN use "/" in paths it sends to Windows itself, through the application interface.

No experience with Win8 to say whether or not Microsoft decided to break this behavior after 20+ years... If they did, it would screw up a LOT of cross-platform programs out there!

It may be that Win8 is enforcing access to the hardware more strictly. Try running it with administrator privileges, to see if it functions.

[Zodler]

Thanks. Tried it as admin and yes now it works.

So if you launch it normal in Windows 8 it doesn't work.

[Woodstock]

That means Win8 is enforcing the access-to-hardware restrictions. My Win7 machines have never complained about this, but I am in the administrator group for them, so it just might be me.

MakeMKV needs direct access to the interface to allow for things like decoding CSS without Windows' permission.