Search Results for: label/mpc-hc

0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoPlay BluRays and DVD’s in MediaCenter with MPC-HC

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

I’ve long run Win­dows Media Cen­ter on my HTPCs in com­bin­a­tion with DVBLink and Medi­aB­rowser. How­ever, recently we have been watch­ing more phys­ic­al disks than in the past, and I have found vari­ous issues with Media Cen­ter. Usu­ally I have MPC-HC con­figured as an extern­al play­er, but doing this for phys­ic­al disks proved less than simple. Even­tu­ally how­ever, I have man­aged to get it work­ing flawlessly.

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1Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoHow to set remote control jump keys for MPC-HC

Posted by & filed under Windows Media Center.

As I’ve doc­u­mented in the past, I have sev­er­al HTPC’s run­ning Win­dows Media Cen­ter.  I also use Medi­aB­rowser for TV series and movies ripped from disk.  I’ve found that Medi­aB­rowser works much bet­ter with an extern­al play­er than the intern­al play­er — per­form­ance seems to be super­i­or — so I use Media Play­er Clas­sic Home Cinema.  I also have sev­er­al Media Cen­ter remote con­trols for use with the vari­ous HTPCs, and one of the most fre­quently used pairs of but­tons are the “jump” or “skip” but­tons which in media cen­ter jump the cur­rent play­back for­ward by 30 seconds or back by 30 seconds.  This is really handy for skip­ping adverts in recor­ded TV.  How­ever, under default install­a­tion set­tings these keys don’t work when play­ing videos in MPC-HC.  After much tri­al and error I finally figured out the cor­rect configuration

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0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoMPC-HC

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

Just a very quick note — The latest ver­sion of media play­er clas­sic home cinema and the stan­dalone codecs seem rather elu­sive. The place to go for alpha and beta releases is XvidVideo.ru

0FFmpeg LogoThe Ultimate Codec Guide

Published by & filed under . Last updated .

How data is stored in a multimedia file

Files on a com­puter (or on an optic­al disk like DVD or BluRay) need to con­tain more than 1 type of data.  A typ­ic­al movie will include at least 1 video “stream” and one audio “stream”.  Most movies include mul­tiple lan­guages and sub­titles, each of which requires an addi­tion­al stream.  Each of these streams is effect­ively a file in its own right, but they are all stored togeth­er with­in a “con­tain­er” which also starts each of them at the right time (sub­titles don’t start imme­di­ately at the start of a movie for example) and keeps them in sync as well as stor­ing meta-data about each of them – i.e. what lan­guage they are, what fram­er­ate and res­ol­u­tion the video is, and what com­pres­sion stand­ards have been used.

Video streams

Video streams con­tain only the video part of the movie.  They are com­pressed using a par­tic­u­lar sys­tem and there should be meta-data about their res­ol­u­tion, fram­er­ate, if they are inter­laced or pro­gress­ive and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Audio streams

Audio streams con­tain only the audio part of the movie.  There are usu­ally mul­tiple audio streams included with the movie and each has its own stream.  They can be com­pressed in a range of ways or in some cases they are uncom­pressed raw audio.  There should be meta-data about their bitrate, res­ol­u­tion, lan­guage, num­ber of chan­nels and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Oth­er streams (e.g. Closed Captions)

Many movies con­tain oth­er streams, most com­monly closed cap­tions (also known as sub­titles).  These come in sev­er­al formats, but are typ­ic­ally just text with time stamps.  They are so small rel­at­ively that no com­pres­sion is used.  There should be meta-data about their language.
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Con­tain­ers which bundle all the streams together

All of the streams that com­prise the movie are bundled togeth­er and kept in sync by a con­tain­er.  The con­tain­er should con­tain (and provide) all the meta-data about each stream.  The con­tain­er also enables the col­lec­tion of streams to be stored as a single file.  The most com­mon con­tain­er formats are VOB (used by DVD) and M2TS (used by BluRay).  Oth­er com­mon con­tain­er formats on PC are TS, MPEG, AVI, MKV, WMV, WTV, DVR-MS and MP4.  The obsol­ete HD-DVD format used EVO containers.

2Windows Media Center eHome LogoFull 7MC codec setup

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

I’ve pre­vi­ously pos­ted sev­er­al times about codec issues on 7mc, but I’ve now got a solu­tion that is com­pre­hens­ive, fairly simple and works con­sist­ently.  With a few free codecs and util­it­ies you can have full decod­ing sup­port, DXVA, sub­titles and fant­ast­ic flex­ib­il­ity work­ing in 64bit (or 32bit) Media Cen­ter.  The fol­low­ing instruc­tions are spe­cif­ic to the x64 edi­tion, but should work just as well on the 32bit edition.
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0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoDecoding Interlaced VC‑1 with DXVA

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

A couple of days ago ver­sion 1.6 of Media Play­er Clas­sic — Home Cinema was released.  Although I don’t use MPC-HC, I do keep an eye on the releases as it can be a use­ful back-up when a file wont play.  It’s been quite a long time since the last offi­cial release so I had a quick scan of the changelog and one thing imme­di­ately leaped at me: “VC‑1 DXVA Decoder now decodes VC‑1 inter­laced mater­i­al”.  Until now there has been no open source x64 codec that will decode inter­laced VC‑1.  Finally hav­ing this avail­able com­pletes cov­er­age for all the media files I have ever tried to play.  Hope­fully this will also get added to ffd­show try­outs and LAV Video in the near future.

0Haali Matroska logoHaali Media Splitter: Official Site Down

Published by & filed under Codecs, News. Last updated .

HTPC related sites and resources seem to be drop­ping like flies at the moment.  First [int­link id=“1918” type=“post”]Media Cen­ter Stu­dio disappeared[/intlink], then [int­link id=“2141” type=“post”]TheHTPC.net developed problems[/intlink], and now the offi­cial site for Haali Media Split­ter is down.  For­tu­nately the media split­ter can still be down­loaded from lots of oth­er sites, and we will keep a mir­ror here in case oth­er sites drop it.  There are also altern­at­ives, includ­ing the MPC-HC stan­dalone codecs and LAV.  Links to these are avail­able on our [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads[/intlink] page.  Lets hope that this is the last in the recent series of HTPC related losses.