An Ask The Expert blog for the Windows Media Center Show hosted by our resident 'expert' Garry Whittaker of Whittaker Moore Associates Ltd
One of the comments that commonly appears in posts about my VMCD utility is "How do i get X decoder to show up in your utility"
For decoders that are XP Media Center compatible this has been explained in this post:
I am also working on adding some of the more common but non MCE Compatible codecs such as FFDShow - more later on that
A recent post reply to a question by Ian Dixon prompted me to take a look at CITA's Ten Foot package of utilities. This turns out to be a really nice collection of add-ins for both XP and Vista Media Center. They may not be the most cutting edge in terms of user experience design and they do run outside of media center but they really do work.
Quoting from their site:
CITA Ten Foot products currently consist of six modules:
You can download them from here.
Well worth a look.
Although you may doubt it even further I am still about.
Hopefully sometime soon I will be back posting and am hoing to start with how to get ffdshow working with VMCD.Before I vanish again a quick tip on tracking down Extender configuration errors. If you get a configuration error when adding a new Extender then take a look in the Media Center section of the event viewer (System Tools) you will probably see an error with an error code a a link for web-help on this error. Rather remarkably this web help can be very helpful at diagnosing the problem.
Hi All
Been getting quite a few emails lately checking up on me. So I thought I had better post that I am alive and well. Recently had some turmoil in my personal life which didn't leave me much time to post but I should be back on track shortly.
One thing this has meant is I had to build a new MediaCenter for myself and I'm very pleased to be able to recommend the MSI Media Live barebones kit. I've built one of these with a Energy Saving AMD Dual Core, 4gb of memory and a terrabyte of hard disk array and it sings. Probably the easiest PC build I have ever done. One gotcha though - the heatsink, although magnificently effective and quiet, is a right pain to get on. Trick for this is to take the power supply out as it makes it a lot easier to maneuver. Even with this fiddle the whole build took only 2 hours.
Link to product on AVSoft's site
I had forgotten just how good this product was until I had to reinstall my Media Center last week (yes even 'expert's' have to do reinstalls). It basically scans all your music and prompts you where there are problems like missing artwork or Album Artist entries. It then allows you to fi them in a very easy and intuaitive way.
Very highly recommended and if you use it and like it can i encourage you to donate.
I've tried valiantly. I've scoured registry dumps that readers have kindly sent in. I've analysed all the relative entries - I've even worked out where a 64 bit version of my decoder utility should post the entries. The only problem is that my current 32 bit app is posting in the right place. Unfortunatley the issue is not in this case getting the entry in the right place its the fact that the decoders themselves are not installing properly for 64 bit operation. This is not easilly worked round if possible at all.
So I'm very sorry to disappoint you 64 bit users - I did try...
One thing that happens quite often in the UK is that sporting events and some concerts are covered simultaneously by TV and Radio.
This has led to quit a common scenario where people will mute their tv and watch the pictures whilst listening to the radio commentary however there is an issue with this since digital tv came in.
Basically DVB-T TV signals require a finite amount of time to process so the image is delayed slightly in appearing. Of course this means that Radio and TV are out of sync which is very annoying at sporting events where you can see what has happened before the commentary catches up.
With media center the obvious thing would be to listen to the freeview DVB-T radio 5 source whilst watching the images from another tuner but unfortunately Media Center doesn't let you do that.
This all came to light for me when the friend I recently built the Media Center for,asked me if she could watch the Wimbledon Tennis coverage whilst listening to the BBC Radio 5 commentary.
At first I couldn't see a solution but then it struck me that Radio 5 has an internet stream on the BBC website and I wondered if she could make use of that.
Well she tried that and yes she could play the internet stream at the same time as watching tv but the stream was now slighly delayed over the tv image. She came up with a brilliant work round for this - Pause the tv until the sound was in sync.
Having got that worked out we still had the issue that she was getting both the radio audio from the web stream and the tv audio from media center.
Now Vista's new sound architecture came to the rescue. Opening the sound mixer in Vista shows independant volume controls for each program playing sound. In this case it was simply a matter of muting the Media Center sound source and hey presto Radio Five commentary on the BBC TV Tennis coverage.
Regretably I've had to relist my GeeXBox project back on Ebay due to non-payment. Its all boxed up and ready to go so if you fancy a bid click here
A lot has been written about the performance advantage of adding a memory card or usb stick to your Vista machine to make use of the ReadyBoost feature but one interesting side effect is that it can also reduce the amount of access needed to your hard disk and appear to make it quieter.
To quote the official Microsoft blurb:
The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache—that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows ReadyBoost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows SuperFetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness.
I recently took up a challenge to build a media center PC for a friend. Having scoured Ebay I found what I thought looked like a really nice case for not too much money. It was also a Barebones system coming with DVD, Floppy and Motherboard. The motherboard only supported a Pentium III up to 800mhz but I decided that I could always upgrade this.
When I received it the case lived up to expectations and was pretty small. So small that on opening it up I found my upgrade options were limited. The case comes with a BookPC BKI810 3.3 motherboard (really tiny and would make a great basis for a Car PC) This is a custom BabyATX design based on the Intel 810 chipset and supports Pentium III processors up to 800mhz with a 100mhz front side bus. There are no PCI expansion ports but it does have on-board video (with TV-out), Audio (with SP-Dif out), Ethernet, Modem, COm, Game Port, Printer and USB (1.0) ports.
Whilst this would have run MCE 2005 it wasn't going to cut the mustard for my friends Hi-def vista media center so I went to plan B for that (more on that in a later post). I guess I could have gone with upgrading the BookPC a Pico-ITX Motherboard buy they are a bit too pricey.
All was not lost with this case however, I had been meaning to look into the prospect of building a Media Extender to work with the uPNP capabilities of Windows Media Player 11 in vista.
Note I say Media Extender - not Media center Extender - I wasn't intending to stream Live TV or even watch Recorded TV in native DVRMS format but I already transcode my Recorded TV to WMV files and Media Player 11 can share them via its built in uPNP media server.
uPNP stands for Universal Plug and Play a set of standards for Network devices to talk to each other. Windows Media Player 11 implements what used to be called Windows Media Connect and is a uPNP AV server. Basically this can be contacted by any uPNP AV client to access any Music, Pictures or Video in your Media Player Library.
I added a 800Mhz processor, hetsink, fan, 512mb Ram and a 20Gb hards drive to the motherboard. Checked it all out and it booted to BIOS fine. Got as bit of a shock when my 800mhz procssor was shown as 600mhz but then realised that the processor was 133mhz FSB so on a 100Mhz FSB board it scaled down to 600mhz. Not a problem it should be plenty fast enough for what I wanted.
So all I needed was a uPNP client. I also wanted something that could use the inbuilt DVD player to play audio/dvds.
I decided to keep costs down and experiment with using Linux. I heard of Myth so tried that first. To cut things short I'm not a Linux guru and I struggled with Myth. I first tried KnopMyth which I just couldn't get to play CD's or DVD's. I then found MythDora which was a much more straightforward install and did play CD and DVD but I couldn't work out how to configure it for uPNP - if even that was possible.
I was about to give up on the Linux route when I made a great discovery GeeXBox. This is a Live CD(basically Linux which boots from a CD and doen't need a hard disk) designed for playing Media and it has a uPNP client.
I downloaded the CD image (it comes in .iso format) and burnt it to CD. Put it in the HTPC Dvd Drive booted and, after a few seconds of Linux boot messages) up popped the menu including an open option. Selecting this gave me a uPNP option and selecting this gave me my media center as a uPNP server. I was stuck here for a few seconds as it wouldn't display a list of contents form my Media Center, until I realised, stupidly, that I hadn't gome to my media center pc and allowed the new device to access. (In Vista this is really easy as a toolbox popup appears on the PC as soon as a new device is detected)
Hey presto I had access to all the Music, Photos and Videos on my media center. I choose a Video (which happened to be a divx avi) and it played instantly and smoothly. This was great but alas my next choice a WMV file failed to play.
Codecs! I thought as one does (quick aside in the Media Center world I wonder if the word Codecs should now be added to swear word filters)
Scouring the excellent GeeXBox web site I found I was right the WMV codecs were not included by default and I would have to build my own custom ISO distribution. That sounded horrible - I really didn't want to get into Linux toolchains. Fortunately GeeXBox had that covered and supply a very user friendly ISO builder. It even went as far as downloading the codecs for me. Excellent. One more button press and it built me a new Iso and a quick burn later I had a functioning GeexBox streaming video from my Media Center. It even managed a WMV HD file albeit a bit broken up.
Streaming Audio was just as easy and my new custom build also gave me shoutcast radio. To top things off DVD's play well as do CD audio (although I do have a problem with a couple stuttering on the first track)
So in summary for around 100 pounds you can pick up all the components for a decent media streaming extender and if you do not fancy building it yourself the kit I used here, with the configure GeeXbox disk, will be up on eBay shortly. I'll post the link here.
EDIT: Its up on ebay CLICK HERE
All I can say about this blog from the creator of the DVRMS Toolbox and particularly thisentry - is 'awesome'.
Don't know how I'd missed this before but I was browsing Microsofts list of Genuine Advantage offers and came across this:
Windows Genuine Advantage Special Offers > Offer Details
Media Center Karaoke Plug-in
Media Center Karaoke Plug-in is designed for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition. Media Center users can use this plug-in to select audio channels when playing VCD or DVD, can display lyrics included in WMA or MP3 music files, can remove vocals from the song, can also control microphone connected to the PC. With this plug-in, the user can enjoy Karaoke experience in Media Center using popular audio/video media files, e.g. WMP3/WMA, not necessary depend on special Karaoke media files or special devices.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
System Requirements
The following hardware and software are required to run Media Center Karaoke Plug-in:
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 or above
Click here for download page
John G posted a great tip in the comments of my Vista Media Center Decoder utility post. He said...
"People have asked me how to get the WinDVD and DSCALER codecs to work in Mediacenter as i reported on their use.
I noticed that whether by accident or design, the Windows XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility will set the "MCE Compatible" flag on a codec to true when you set it as the system default codec.
So..
a) use Xp codec util to set as default
b) run the above Vista MC codec util, the codec will now appear in the list, select it and set.
No responsibility taken for this method.
Cheers
jgriffin"
Thanks John that's excellent.
Just to let you all know that whilst I will continue to update this blog I will also be cross posting on the Ian Dixon's new thedigitallifestyle.com(http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/blogs/default.aspx) blogs section.
I did consider just moving my blog over there but I realised that there was just too much content still on here :-)
Hi all
Apologies that I haven't posted for a while. The primary reason being that I've been busy working on the new version of TheNeverEndingStory site for which I'm the CTO and technology evangelist (love that title)
In case you don't know TheNeverEndingStory is a place where people can collaborate on writing stories and poems. Based on the DocRoc platform it means they can start their own stories, read other people's stories, add pages to stories written by other members and even write the next page of a story written by a famous face - including some best selling authors. Most of all its just plain fun.
Its only been up a few days but it has already attracted some great contributions by members - really compelling content.
So why is this Almost Off-Topic. Well the really exciting news is that I can announce that we will be launching a Vista Media Center version of the site using the Media Center Presentation Layer. Yes I'm getting my hands dirty and ploughing into Media Center Markup Language.
Hopefully a few screen shots will be forthcoming over the next few days. So keep watching.
Almost missed these as they only show up as an optional update, but there is a new updated driver for the Cinergy XS USB DVB Tuner on Windows Vista Update (note the original not the Hybrid or the Diversity version).
This seems to have fixed all the issues I was having with multiple of these tuners in vista such as not tuning immediately to a channel and coming up with No signal messages on recordings.
No mention on the Terratec site yet but I'm sure it will be there shortly.
On a side note if any manufacturer wants to send me any USB TV tuners for review I will be doing a review shortly.
I don't usually post news but for Vista Media Center owners this is too good to missed. The Microsoft Windows Live Team recently announced Windows Live for TV. For some reason the beta is currently only open to US residents which seems a shame.
Basically this beta is the project, formerly known as Nemo and now know as Orbit, which brings the functions of Windows Live to Vista Media Center. The really exciting thing is it brings the full messenger experience including Video Calling.
Now we know why they dropped messenger from the Vista Media Center build.
More info from our friends at
Liveside
Ian Dixon today updated the Media Center Show forums to the latest community server and announced the Media Center Show community.
This is really exciting and we are looking at ways to integrate my blog into this great community.
So hurry on over and check out the show forums there are great Ask the Expert tips and general discussion to be found http://www.iandixon.co.uk/cs/forums
If you use the MyDVD's feature in Media Center (and if that doesn't mean anything to you then take a look at http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/77389.aspx) then you will know how difficult it can be to find the right dvdid.xml files for your dvds. Help is at hand - DVDxml.com currently catalogs over 15,000 DVD Titles (currently Region 1 only) and their dvdid information.
Head on over to http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/143671.aspx for news on how to get SKY including encrypted channels in Media Center.
Its also worth noting that the supplier mentioned in this post also has a solution for TopUp-TV on UK Digital Terrestrial
As you may know Media Center Edition natively supports a maximum of two tuners (well 3 if you also have an over the air HDTV card in the US)
For quite a while there have been a number of forum posts around the web (particularly on the Green Button) with walk throughs of a complex procedure to add more tuners, these have been beyond the average mortal though.
Thankfully Ramon Van Bruggen is about to change that with what like it may become the ultimate utility for adding more than one tuner. Its in early beta but is progressing very nicely.
Head on over to http://mce.ramonvanbruggen.nl for more information and to join the beta programme.
Not all XBox 360's are created equal and it appears that some have noisier fans than others when in Media Center extender mode. One thing I have definitely noticed with our 360 is that it is a lot quieter when laid on its side (horizontally) than when in the vertical position. Not sure why this should be but, from reading a load of web posts, it does seem to be a common feature.
So if you have a noisy 360 lay it down.
IMPORTANT - never move your 360 with the power on and disc in the drive. if you do you may very well scratch the disc and even possibly damage the drive heads.
Aaron works for Microsoft and his blog is a fount of knowledge about both Media Center and Setup issues.
In particular if you are have Media Center 2005 issues its worth a look at Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 troubleshooting guide
Aaron's articles can be a little technical for the novice but they are worth the effort.
I know quite a few people have bought one of the many Nano-Style MP4 players that have been appearing all over Ebay for very reasonable prices. (Although I'm not recommending any particular supplier - an example can be found here)
Mainly manufactured in China these are pretty good devices and work well to synch music to in Media Center.
One major issue is the manual supplied with them. I mean do you understand 'Grow the play button'. The translation from the Chinese leaves a lot to be desired.
Fortunately I have come up with a solution and as a reader of this blog you can get it at a discount.
Available now:
Garry's 1GB,2GB,4GB 'Nano-Clone' MP3/MP4 Player Manual
Vista has this great feature formerly known as User Account Protection (UAP) and now known as User Account Control (UAC) which is designed to protect you from malicious code. Because of my issues with Activation (see post below) I have this turned off so I had forgotten when I wrote my decoder app about a little thing called virtualization.
Now UAC doesn't think its a good idea to let nasty apps write into the Local machine area of the registry (very wisely) and therefore has a clever trick that when they do it redirects that write to another virtual area of the registry. Basically this means that legacy applications do not fail when they write and read the Local machine area of the registry but they don't actually update the local machine setting.
The decoder settings are in the Local machine area of the registry so, suprise suprise, if UAC is turned on you will find my decoder utility doesn't actually do much.
So the bottom line is, for now, you will have to temporarily turn off UAP/UAC using msconfig (details in an earlier post) prior to using the decoder utility to get it to work.
Over on his blog Aaron, who is part of Microsoft's Media Center team has a great tip on how to change the direction the arrow keys move through the new mini-guide on Vista.
In my post below Vista Media Center changing default decoder I mentioned I was working on something to make the process of changing the default MPEG-2 Video and Audio decoders in Vista a little easier.
Well here it is the Vista Media Center Decoder utility. This utility will show you the current default decoders, let you select an alternative from a list of installed decoders and by pressing Set Default change the defaults. Although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, you can even select a Video Decoder from one provider and an Audio Decoder from another.
Use at your own risk but it worked for me.
Download Utility - note you must save this program locally.
Update - This application requires .net Framework v2
I've been playing quite a bit with and like the new beta of Media Center on Vista.
One of the nice things Microsoft have done which will make life a lot easier is to include an Mpeg-2 Decoder with every copy of Vista. This is the bit of software that makes it possible to watch DVD's and view Live and Recorded TV. Those of you who have built your own Media Center Edition PC's using 2005 will know this is a big deal as previously you would have had to buy a decoder from a third-party like Nvidia or Cyberlink.
So all in all a good thing. Wait though, what if you like something the third party decoder does for you? Perhaps it has more settings than the default decoder. Maybe it handles sound better. You would probably guess you could just install your old decoder and Media Center would use that.
Hmmm not exactly!
I've been having performance issues with the default decoder so I thought I would try the Nvidia one instead (I have an Nvidia graphics card and prevously the nvidia PureVideo encoder has worked better with it than the Cyberlink one)
So I installed the Nvidia Encoder opened Media Center, played recorded TV and... no difference. Fair enough I thought maybe my hardware is just not up to Vista but then I realised that the Nvidia icon wasn't showing in the system tray which it usually would when playing video.
After doing some digging I discovered that Vista was still using the Microsoft decoder. Ok I thought, in XP you could use the Microsoft XP Decoder Checkup utility to change the default codec. So, wondering if it would work in Vista, I downloaded ran that utility and... the Nvidia was set as the default decoder - duh!
To cut a long story short Vista media Center stores its default decoder settings in a different place in the registry to XP.
In vista they are in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Decoder whereas in XP they were in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video
The actual key names are the same
PreferredMPEG2AudioDecoder and PreferredMPEG2VideoDecoder
The Nvidia install had populated the old XP values, so it was a 'simple' matter of copying the values from Service\Video to \Decoder using the registry editor and away I went. The Nvidia icon popped up when I played Recorded TV and there was an improvement in playback.
Now I am not going to suggest that anyone modifies their registry. Modifying the registry is a risky business and you could prevent your PC from working.
But I am working on something which will make this process a whole lot easier...
If you are part of the Vista Beta program then you might run into an issue of being prompted to activate after an upgrade. That in itself would not be a problem but there is a glitch with the new UAP (User Access Protection - I think) feature that causes activation to fail with an error 0x8007000D.
Fortunately you can work round this by disabling UAP.
I've seen write ups for this solution in several places but one of the clearest is how Richard Wu described the solution in a recent Technet Forum post:
1) Make sure the internet connection is active
2) Restart the PC. After the BIOS screen hit F8 a couple of times untill you see the Advanced Boot Options menu. Select Safe Mode and hit Enter.
3) Click on the Windows Key + R on the keyboard. This will open a RUN box. Type MSCONFIG and press Enter.
4) On MSCONFIG, select the TOOLS tab, scroll down and go to "Disable UAP". Hit the Launch button, close the command windows afterwards and click OK.
5) Restart the PC.
6) Logon to the PC with a user that has the Administrative permissions (If you have more than one account take the first account you created). Just like before when logging in as a user the "Activate Windows now" dialog appears. If not appear, use my above method to call the activation process out.
Note that the little shields are now gone from the options. Make sure you have internet connection and hit Activate now. Assuming your product key is correct you'll soon be smiling at the "Activation was successful" message.
On his blog Matt Goyer notes:
You don’t have to wait for Vista for some bugs to be fixed. Get the July rollup for fixes to Media Center 2005. What does this fix?
Horizontal white lines appear when playing a DVD
Media Center may crash when using the ListMaker SDK sample application
Media Center may crash when you open a menu page
A black screen appears when trying to play a DVD
There more details in the kb article
On today's Media Center Show Podcast Ian had a question about how to improve wi-fi connectivity. The listener had been trying to stream over 802.11g without success. One trick which can greatly improve the quality of service for 802.11g on most Access Points is to switch them to G Mode only. This is usually an option on the Wireless Access Points settings screen. By switching off B compatibility you prevent speed degradation by other B devices connecting.
Now this isn't the whole story as the 802.11 band is very crowded and things like Microwave ovens can equally be problematic but it might help.
One of the new features in Vista is a view for music that shows Album Art grouped by Artist. This has attracted a great deal of attention but I've been surprised by how few people know you can do something similar in the 2005 version of Media Center.
The trick is to press the more info button when you have Albums highlighted in the menu on the left-hand-side of the Music view. If you do this you will get a pop-up menu that includes options to view by list and sort by Artist.
Selecting Sort by Artist will do exactly that and your Album Art will appear sorted by Artist. Its not as clever as Vista, however, and no grouping of albums takes place but it still can be useful.
You can change back by repeating the above process where you will find the More Info menu will have changed to include Sort Alphabetically.
If you have any tips you think user may not know. Please let me know.
Welcome. I'm Garry Whittaker and I am the expert from Ian Dixon's (www.IanDixon.co.uk) Media Center Show podcast. Up to now I've kept a low profile and prowled the Media Center Show forums answering listener's questions whilst at the same time providing Media Center consultancy to the client's of my company Whittaker Moore Associates Ltd (www.WhittakerMoore.com). I also developed MyRemoteMouse (www.MyRemoteMouse.com).
However I've finally been persuaded, by some vocal and persuasive parties, to start my own Media Center Blog to answer some of those common questions and to also provide some hints and tips.
So how will this differ from the other Media Center blogs? I'm going to be concentrating on hints and tips and solutions. So expect this blog to be less newsy than some of the others. I'll still post news if its likely to help solve a problem - say a new patch release - but mainly it will be hints and tips.
By the way if you are in the UK and interested in expert consultancy on Media Center, be it problem solving, implementation design or develpment, at a reasonable cost, please see www.WhittakerMoore.com for contact details.
All the best
Garry
If you have any questions for the blog please email me at garryjw 'at' whittakermoore 'dot' com
