A _disk_id.pod file appears on a windows flash drive - windows

What causes a _disk_id.pod file to appear on a windows flash drive, and is it advisable to remove it?

_disk_id.pod is created by Windows Live Movie Maker. I had accidentally changed my "choose default program ..." settings which was causing the video files to open with the Windows Live Movie Maker program. Even if you do not do anything with the video in the Movie Maker program or save anything in it the program will still create this file on the sd card.
PT

For me I think the answer is _disk_id.pod belongs to media player software (in my case KMV).
I think it permits the software to identify a particular volume (in case you have saved playlists). The name kinda makes sense.
I have seen other explanations of .POD but none that make as much sense in this context (i.e. removable media).

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Microsoft SysVAD Virtual Audio Device Driver (SYSVAD) cannot work

This driver (https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/master/audio/sysvad) is provided by Microsoft. And in its README, the last part, it says:
Locate an MP3 or other audio file on the target computer and
double-click to play it. Then in the Sound dialog box, verify that
there is activity in the volume level indicator associated with the
SYSVAD (with APO Extensions) driver.
But in my target computer, the volume level indicator associated with the SYSVAD (with APO Extensions) driver does not change at all. And the target computer does not make any sound.
The same case to the mic, when set default mic to any of the sysvad mic array, the mic volume level will not change at all.
In my understanding, sysvad driver is virtual driver. So it will not really work. But why Microsoft README says: there is activity in the volume level indicator associated with the SYSVAD (with APO Extensions) driver.
The SYSVAD documentation leaves a lot to be desired. You won't see any activity in the volume level indicator, and you won't hear anything, since the only thing the rendering endpoints do is save a copy of the audio output to file (look for C:\STREAM_HOST_*.wav files).
The capture endpoints (including the "loopback" pins) generate constant sine-wave signals, which you can see if you use an app to record them, and then view them in a sound editor/viewer or play them back out to a real device.
I am working on SysVad too and sure it works, for Mic you can test with vlc player
Try to open the virtual mic from VLC and then you will hear sound, it's a sin wave generated by driver itself

Generated Thumbnails on some Windows installations overruled by icon of associated program

I have written a Windows thumbnail handler for specific file types. I have two pc's running Windows 7 Enterprise. On one pc everything goes well. On the other pc, the thumbnail generation works only when there is no program associated with the file extension. In that case the thumbnail generation is taken over by the associated program (I see an icon). Changing the associated program (e.g. to Notepad++) changes the icon. I suspect this to be a registry setting, or a folder view option, but I have no idea where to start looking.
Answers appreciated.

Windows: suppress warning when plugging in unformatted flash drive

I'm working on a device that writes some information directly to a flash drive, without using any file system (it just writes blocks of data directly to the disk sectors). After the flash drive is filled, I need to plug it into any computer with windows and read data using my application.
Everything works great except for when I plug the flash drive in windows warns me that flash drive is invalid an offers me to format it. I want to get rid of this message for my flash drives on any computer that have installed my windows application.
My flash drive have signature bytes at the start so I can always make out whether it's my flash drive or just a regular flash drive.
My idea is that I should be able to write some sort of service or driver which will check all flash drives and will disallow OS to mount my drives. However I don't know whether its really possible and I can't find any documents mentioning this sort of functionality.
I'd appreciate any docs / links / functions names that can help me suppress unformatted disk warning.
Make a tiny real partition at the start and format it to keep windows happy.
Then just use the rest of the drive as you please
This seems to work:
Remove the drive letter assigned to the device:
Right-click the 'Computer' (or 'My Computer') icon on your desktop or in the Start Menu and select Manage. The 'Computer Management' window should appear.
From the list on the left, select 'Disk Management' (within the Storage sub-tree).
Right-click the encrypted partition/device and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Click Remove.
If Windows prompts you to confirm the action, click OK.

Auto Open USB Drive on Mac 10.6/7/8/Windows XP/Vista/7

I'm creating a FAT32 formatted USB Stick/Drive to ship a product. We'd like it to behave a bit more like the hybrid CD/DVD's that we create:
Insert the disk on Mac 10.6 or later and the drive opens up and shows you a window with the application in it. We can do it from a DMG or CD but the USB drive doesn't seem to want to honor the bless command.
On Windows, we've set up an autorun.inf. On XP it's not showing the icon, label, or opening the specified file. I know that you can't have Windows Vista and Windows 7 automatically open something or add an entry to the AutoPlay list by default, but it still should show the Volume Label and icon.
Here is my autorun.inf:
[AutoRun]
Action="Install My Cool App"
Open="InstallThis.exe"
icon="Ultimate.ico"
[Content]
MusicFiles=false
PictureFiles=false
VideoFiles=false
Are these things too much to ask for a USB stick? Anyone else out there shipping things on a USB flash drive and have overcome these issues?
As of Windows 7, AutoRun feature is not supported on USB drives. Only the following commands are supported:
label
icon
See Improvements to AutoPlay on Engineering Windows 7 blog.
Examples in Autorun.inf Entries do not use quotes for values. Does it work without the quotes?
MacOS might have implemented a similar approach to Windows 7: do not autorun anything from a flash drive automatically to protect you from malware.

Opening Flash file from USB automatically on Win/Mac

I need to have a flash file be opened and viewed from a USB automatically on both Win and Mac.
I read about various solutions depending on the format of the flash output:
autorun.inf if Flash published as exe(Win)/app(Mac)) which seems to be working only on Win;
html embedding if Flash is published as swf, but this turns into a problem of launching html file.
What is the best known practice/solution?
For the PC, you can use an autorun script. On the Mac, there is no such feature (thankfully). What you can do on the Mac is have the Mac partition open, and using a background image, display instructions to "click here to start", or whatever other verbiage you desire, pointing to your Flash Projector file.
will this help ?

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