Posts Categorised: HTPCs

1Windows Media Center eHome LogoSpeeding up WMP12 & 7MC media library database

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

One of the prob­lems with my HTPC that I have only just star­ted look­ing at is how to use it to play and man­age my large col­lec­tion of audio CD’s which I have painstak­ingly ripped to FLAC’s. The Xiph codecs (see pre­vi­ous art­icles [int­link id=“38” type=“post”]here[/intlink] and [int­link id=“14” type=“post”]here[/intlink]) make it pos­sible to play FLACs in 64bit media cen­ter, but the media lib­rary was incred­ibly slow.
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0Haali Matroska logoHaali finally release official x64 splitter

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

Haali Media Split­ter is now “offi­cially” avail­able for 64bit. To down­load simply go to the Haali site and down­load from the link at the top right. Both 32bit and 64bit split­ter are included. Vari­ous fixes are men­tioned altho I haven’t yet had oppor­tun­ity to test them.

0Xiph Codecs Logo64bit Xiph codec breaks file-type dialog in WMP12

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

In an [int­link id=“14” type=“post”]earlier article[/intlink] I recom­men­ded installing the Xiph codecs to sup­port FLAC files in 64bit Media Play­er and Media Cen­ter. One of the com­ments (my thanks to thom007) on that post poin­ted out that the Xiph codecs break the “file type” dia­log box in Media Play­er 12. Below is a work-around which restores the file-type dia­log box. The pos­sible side effects are as yet unknown, so exper­i­ment at your own risk.
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0Flash Flv LogoPlaying downloaded FLV’s

Published by & filed under Codecs, Misc Media Software, Misc Software. Last updated .

I recently had a prob­lem with 2 PCs which appeared to be con­figured identic­ally, but whilst one would play a FLV down­loaded from you­tube, the oth­er would fail. Some oth­er FLVs played OK on both sys­tems. After much fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion I dis­covered that the act­iveX ver­sion of flash play­er on 1 of the PC’s was up-to-date, but on the oth­er was not.
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0DVD Shrink LogoAutomate DVD Ripping on Windows 7

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software. Last updated .

With my recent HTPC pro­ject now work­ing really well, I want to rip my col­lec­tion of DVDs to my media serv­er for more con­veni­ent play­back in Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter (and all the addi­tion­al bene­fits asso­ci­ated with Media Browser, par­tic­u­larly the meta data on rat­ings, syn­op­sis, etc). Rip­ping DVDs, whilst straight­for­ward is rather tedi­ous. I found an excel­lent meth­od of auto­mat­ing the pro­cess was to modi­fy my auto­play set­tings with Auto­Play Repair, and point the auto­play to a pro­gram called DVD Rip which auto­mates the rip­ping of DVDs with the well known DVD Shrink.
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0Windows Media Center eHome LogoFixed: Media Center 7 behind taskbar on startup

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve had a very irrit­at­ing prob­lem with my new Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter HTPC setup. I have 7MC set to load full­screen on star­tup (as the PC is a ded­ic­ated HTPC), but some­thing I changed at some point was caus­ing the taskbar to show on top of Media Cen­ter (i.e. Media Cen­ter did­n’t have win­dow focus) and there­fore my remote con­trol did­n’t work until using the mouse func­tion to click on Media Cen­ter to refo­cus it (at which point the taskbar disappears).
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0Windows Media Player LogoSwitching the default WMP to x64 in Windows 7

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software. Last updated .

One of the strangest things in Win­dows 7 x64 is the pres­ence of both x86 and x64 ver­sions of Win­dows Media Play­er 12. Even stranger is that des­pite Win­dows Media Cen­ter being 64bit only (and there­fore requir­ing 64bit codecs) Microsoft saw fit to set the default WMP12 ver­sion to the x86 edi­tion. For those of us who don’t wish to main­tain 2 sets of codecs it is desir­able to change this default status. How­ever, Microsoft do not appear to have provided a simple way to do this as yet. So here’s how…
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0Windows Media Player LogoOutputting WMP Videos to second display

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software. Last updated .

When using a PC with a second dis­play (for example a laptop with a data pro­ject­or) it is often a com­mon prob­lem to find that a video played with Win­dows Media Play­er will only dis­play on the primary dis­play, and not on the sec­ond­ary output.

There are vari­ous dif­fer­ent con­fig­ur­a­tions which con­trib­ute to this beha­viour — Win­dows set­tings, Win­dows Media Play­er set­tings and Graph­ics Card driver settings.
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2Haali Matroska logoUninstall Haali Media Splitter x64

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

There is a beta (or maybe its Alpha) installer for Haali Media Split­ter x64 out and about (for links to the installer see my pre­vi­ous post on [int­link id=“14” type=“post”]windows 7 x64 codecs[/intlink]). Sadly the unin­stall seems to be broken, which can cause hav­oc when try­ing to dia­gnose codec issues. To remove Haali com­pletely you need to unre­gister the fol­low­ing files manu­ally using regsvr32 /u filename (from a com­mand prompt run as administrator)
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