The M4300 replaces the M65 which was a qualified laptop 

Edit: just found a thread on the Express Pro forum that suggests not

Free DV is no longer an Avid product so, going forward Hardware compatibility will be a crap shoot.

One thing for certain, it won't run on Vista.

 I'm guessing that it was the cost of making it Vista compatible that made Avid withdraw it...

Nope, this was done before Vista was a gleam in Bill's eye.

I've been keeping up with most of the posts here because I have and use Free DV occasionally.  When I saw this thread, I installed and am at this moment running Free DV 1.6.1 on my Vista laptop.  The GPU on this computer seems to be wrong for Free DV even though it's an Nvidia (the timeline plays but without updating the image until stopped).    Importing and exporting worked (at least exporting seemed to work - with this GPU, it's hard to say - the file plays poorly and it looks like the rendering was faulty.)  I didn't buy this laptop to run video editing software so it's a low-end model.

I had to run the installer and Free DV both in XP compatibility mode for them to work but they worked at least to some degree.  Based on that, maybe it's worth a shot for people to try unless problems like these are common with Free DV on Vista.

I checked it on my Vista laptop and it ran, although not really well since this laptop probably isn't quite right for Free DV.  The video played but the image didn't update until it was stopped.  Import and export seemed to work fine but I'm not sure that rendering was correct.  The exported file had some problems but that could have just been the GPU.  On other systems, things could be different.

Both the installer and Free DV had to be set for XP compatibility mode.

(This is information I posted earlier but it was caught in the moderation queue for some reason.  I'm curious to see if this post also gets held up. - it didn't this time.  Hmmm.)

smyers63:

I checked it on my Vista laptop and it ran, although not really well since this laptop probably isn't quite right for Free DV.  The video played but the image didn't update

There is a huge difference between "It Ran" and "it works". you may be able to launch it but it won't work and you can't get support for it.

This is what you said before, Todd: "One thing for certain, it won't run on Vista."

"Run", not "work."  I have found that it does "run" and reported that for the original poster.  Now you say it won't "work."  There seems to be a problem in communication here.

So, it's confirmed that it doesn't work on Vista, Todd?  I hadn't seen that posted here before.  I don't care about having support personally.  It was a free program.  I also don't plan to use it on Vista, just for the record.  Being a beta tester, I routinely try things out that maybe other people haven't tried, so I tested Free DV on Vista after seeing this thread and reported the results for the original poster.

The video image not updating is also common with XP when used with certain GPUs, so that by itself wouldn't keep me from trying Free DV with Vista if that was my inclination.  If it doesn't work and won't work, then fine.  I sure wouldn't expect to run MC successfully on Vista or this "uncertified" laptop but that doesn't necessarily mean that I couldn't get it to work.  Same for Free DV.

Well, like I said, "Doesn't work" means a lot of things. You can launch and maybe hack the video drivers (Maybe) and then you can some how keep it from crashing to access violation errors and locking up on you. Once you've done that, then yes it will "work".

As we've discussed Mike, Free DV is no longer an Avid product so, any future testing on the product will be left up to the few folks still using it. So, if you get it to work, post back here and let us know.