All things windows 7 Media Center delves into the world of Media Center specific to Windows 7. Talking about codecs, plugins and more.
Episode-alert.com allows you to follow your favorite TV Shows, mark your episodes and keep track of all kinds of amazing things. Next to eating bananas and sausages on a daily basis this is the place to be for a real TV Show addict.
Even if you dislike mustard you are welcome to receive episode alerts for the simpsons or any other uber fun tv serie tracker.
Peace out and sausages forever, thx for joining.
Steve the Pirate.
Check out the following url which is pretty awesome and talks about a smartphone called HTC Tattoo. But some other links are quite cool aswell. Like a review of this wvga games that is awesome to the max.
Often i tell you about monkeys, well this is the best day you ever seen about monkeys. The banana’s are REALLY low prices so i bought a shitload of tem. Anyway check out this windows mobile game review.
If you are interested in Windows Mobile or iPhone, check out this Windows Mobile 6.5 vs iPhone hubpages. It’s quite nice.
http://windowsmobilegames.wordpress.com/
windowsmobile4u.blogspot.com
http://allthingswindowsmobile.yolasite.com/
http://windowsmobilefreaks.weebly.com/
http://berned.vox.com/
Holy Batman in a skirt, awesome news for people who enjoy MKV video acceleration without all the configuration. Well atleast if you don’t care about subtitles just yet. All you need is this new codec from DivX labs that hooks into Windows Media Foundation and BAM accelerated MKV h.264 uber movie playback in Windows Media Center and player. Enjoy this amazing post hack7mc.com made about this topic.
DivxLabs Previously, getting MKV to work properly inside Windows 7 Media Center has required quite a bit of effort on the part of the end user. It was necessary to install a number of third party codecs, make modifications to the registry and tweak codec settings to get everything to play nicely. By default Windows 7 Media Center uses a new method for playing back audio video content known as Windows Media Foundation which replaces the older method known as DirectShow. Unfortunately, every codec package available to this point is programmed for DirectShow and doesn’t take advantage of the new WMP format meaning playing non-supported formats was a substantial hassle.
Luckily for us there is a small light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Divx Lab’s MKV project. The Divx Lab’s project aims to utilize the Windows Media Foundation to enable playback of the popular MKV format on both the main Media Center machine as well as extenders. Not only does this mean support for extenders but it could also very well mean the end to playing with various codec package settings to tweak the audio/video settings to match the output of the default Media Center playback.
Beyond enabling playback through your Windows Media Center Extenders, the picture quality of the Windows Media Foundation solution is incredible and contains complete DVXA hardware acceleration support. So not only is the quality fantastic but hardware acceleration will keep frame rates right where they should be without the drops that can sometimes occur with CPU intensive codecs such as FFDShow.
Using Divx Lab’s MKV preview video quality is amazing in full 1080p without so much as a hint of latency in the playback. There are still a few downsides to using the preview though. For instance, you’ll still be required to install a third party codec for audio playback depending on the audio encoding used for your movies. The newest version of AC3Filter is all you’ll need though and provides ACM wrapper allowing the playback to be passed through Windows Media Foundation as well.
The last year harddisk prices have been dropping like there is no tomorrow. For the price of a mere 60 dollars you can get one terabyte of storage these days. Cosidering these cheap storage prices more and more people have started to rip/convert their DVD collection to their storage devices (HTPC or NAS). Cosidering most movies can be ripped to your disk and would take around 4-5 gigabyte of room even buying one of these harddrives can host more then 200 movies for you. So what are your options? Should you encode your dvd movies to another format? Or just rip them and keep quality high.
Ripping raw DVD movies
The two most used programs for ripping DVD movies to your harddrive are defintily DVD Shrink and DVD Fab. DVD Shrink sadly is not supported anymore and can’t handle all DVD’s anymore. This leaves DVD Fab as the number one program for ripping DVD movies to your harddrive. The best thing about this? It’s free. You can download DVD Fab here.
DVDFab - You can custimize how you want your backup
With DVD Fab you can choose to copy only the movie and the desired audio track/subtitle track to your harddrive. Often saving quite a little bit of space because you are ignoring the menu and extras. So what is the benefit of this method? Wel for starters; it’s really fast. Copying one DVD often takes only 5-7 minutes depending on the size and encryption method used. There is also no quality loss at all. The downside of this method would be that storage could be a limiting factor, but as said earlyer, 200 movies for around 60 dollars is not a huge investment.
Hey guys, Staba here Today I would like to talk about a plugin I have been using recently. The plugin I speak of is called Media Browser. Since around a month now I’ve had it installed on my HTPC, and so far I’ve been very enthusiastic.
What is Media Browser?
So what exactly is Media Browser? Quoted from the Media Browser website:
“Media Browser is a free media aggregator plugin for Media Center that takes your recorded, digital, or ripped media and presents it in a simple, easy to use interface. Media Browser prides itself on delivering a fast, intuitive, media rich experience for the whole family.“
How does Media Browser work?
So what does this all mean, what exactly is a media aggregator? What they mean in this instance, is that this media center plugin automatically downloads information about the media on your HTPC. Media Browser downloads posters, backdrops, and metadata (summary, genre, rating, etc) of all your movies to it’s cache. After finalizing installation of Media Browser you have to run the ‘Configuration Wizard’ that the plugin comes with. When you run this shortcut you come into a little application that allows you to setup different aspects of the plugin. Things like themes, folders, perhaps streaming to xbox 360 (transcoding). Below you will find a example of how it will aggregate your media files into a nice looking interface within Windows 7 Media Center (7MC).
Media browser; file structure to pretty interface
The example above shows you how a folder structures will translate into a nice looking interface within 7MC. I will elaborate a little bit;
In the Media Browser configuration utility you set your folder to c:\divx\movies\ for example. Media Browser will now look in this folder and find the following movies:
\Terminator 2\movie.avi
\Rambo 3\movie.avi
\Predator\movie.avi
Media Browser uses the name of the folder to look up the title of the movie on an external website called tmdb.org. So what really matters is how you name your folders, the movie files itself do not matter for a successful movie lookup. Below a screenshot of how this looks in the movie detail view (keep in mind all I have is folders with names and a movie file in these folders):
Movie detail view of Media Browser
Later on this week I will write an article about installing Media Browser with some tips and tricks. For now, thanks for reading.
For additional information do check out the Media Browser website, and check a youtube movie I shot (with my telephone camera) on youtube.
Playing MKV files and possibly accelerating them with a compatible graphics card has been a hot item these last couple of months. Different solutions and different approaches have been posted on the Internet so far. Below I will list a couple of articles that you mind find interesting if you are looking too achieve this yourself:
Playing MKV’s in Media Center – hack7mc.com
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/01/playing-mkvs-in-media-center.html
And if you don’t like codec packs:
MKVs for Minimalist on Windows 7 Media Center
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/02/mkvs-for-minimalists-on-windows-7.html
I would recommand the following forums for further information:
http://forum.doom9.org
http://www.avsforum.com
http://thegreenbutton.com
Thanks to all these great websites and communities for having such great information available. It sure helped me alot, I hope it does help you as well.
Windows Media Center is a software package that is included in Windows Vista/7. With this program you can enjoy your media on the television. Under Windows XP there was a seperate release for Media Center, this release was named ‘Windows MC 2005′. Some fo the features that are included in Windows Media Center 7 are:
- Watching DVD’s (Now also VIDEO_TS folders since Windows 7!)
- DivX/WMV etc. playback
- Internet Radio
- Some games (solitaire you can play with your remote)
- Radio/TV (Cable digital)
- Music collection management and playback
And there are alot of third party developers making plugins for different versions of Media Center. You configure it how you want, and as much as you want. There are just a couple of reason I prefer a HTPC/Media Center PC over using standalone media players.
