NCH Software
NCH
Software (formerly
NCH Swift Sound) is a software development company founded in 1993 in Canberra, Australia. The Denver office was started in April 2008 due to the large U.S.
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Some users have reported finding unexpected additional software
when installing NCH programs. However, WOT Services and McAfee SiteAdvisor both claim NCH Software website to be
free of Adware/Malware. Nevertheless,
most NCH software products are known to install unrequested on-demand
components such as codecs and other software produced by the company -
sometimes these components are installed without the users' knowledge.
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Certain NCH products hijack already - registered file extensions
without permission, bringing up the NCH on-demand installer when a file with
this extension is clicked, instead of the previously registered program. This
is confirmed with Debut Video Capture and ISO file extensions.
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After uninstalling certain NCH products, the on-demand installer
remains installed and will continue attempting to install NCH software in
certain circumstances. After uninstalling Debut Video Capture, the on-demand
installer file name is prism.exe and can be located in (program files) \NCH
Software\Prism. This may vary with different NCH products. A context menu
hijack also interferes directly with software that is already installed on the
users system. For example, the following registry key was found after
uninstalling Debut Video Capture: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WinRAR\Shell\NCH extract.
The key displays a link to the on-demand installer for Express Zip whenever a
winRAR context menu is displayed. This issue can be solved by a simple registry
search for "NCH extract" however, there appears to be no official
solution provided by NCH.
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A lot of users have reported Blue Screens (BSOD) by using NCH
products such as Debut or Sound Tap, especially in Windows 7 64-bit systems.
The blue screen critical crash always points to an NCH device driver named stdriver64.sys. In spite of a
lot of criticism and support requests, there is no known solution from NCH. In
some systems the BSOD can be reproduced by installing Debut and Voxal Voice
Changer, and clicking "preview".
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Prism Video Converter has been reported to include FFmpeg in
violation of the LGPL license.
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Beware limited software update policy: NCH only allow access to
their software updates and bug-fixes for a period of 3 months, after which
point the end user may have to re-purchase the software to receive updates and
fixes for a further 3 months. Response to bugs are typically very slow, so a
bug reported in software bought today may not get fixes within the 3 month
update period and the user will need to re-purchase the software to receive the
fix or update when released.
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