Since there is a power outage today that closed school I have had some time to get to doing some things I have been meaning to do for a while.

A few weeks ago I upgraded my laptop hard drive to 320 gigs and upgraded to Vista Ultimate x64 from Vista Business x64.  With this I gained Windows Media Center to use with my TV tuner instead of the worthless ATI software that came with it.  Well I found a few things out about Media Center that drove me up the wall.

One was that it didn’t natively support avi files.  Not a huge deal by itself, so I installed the Xvid codec to get things working.  No dice.  The files played just fine in Windows Media Player, but not in Media Center.  So I figured it had something to do with it being a “3rd party” codec.  So I un-installed it and tried the name brand DiVX codec.  Again, played fine in Media Player but not in Media Center.  So I did some digging and came back to ffdshow, something I haven’t had to use and hadn’t seen since 2004 when I started using VLC for everything.  Tried installing that, again Media Player worked but no Media Center.

After many many hours of digging I came across a blog entry that told me Vista Media Center didn’t use Media Player to play media like Windows XP Media Center did (or at least tap into the same codecs).  It pointed me in the direction of the Media Control Plugin for Media Center written by Damien Bain-Thouverez.  What his little plugin did was point Media Center to the ffdshow codec and allow all sorts of things.  Including (get this) the ability to skip forward and backward.  It provides a bunch of other features for Media Center video.  It is an absolutely must have.  It is also compiled for native x64, works nicely with UAC in Vista (for those who have it turned on) and has yet to cause any problems for me outside of a message popping up about a program not integrating well with MCE.  I ignored it and things are still working.  You can go here for the plugin.  Be sure to read his site for more information.

The second problem I was having with Vista Media Center was its lack of support for Hybrid Tuners, that is TV tuners that support NTSC and ATSC signals (Analog and Over The Air HD).  I have an ATI Tv Wonder 600 USB.  This tuner has the ability to tune NTSC, ATSC, as well as S-Video, and Composite Video with stereo audio.  Vista Media Center does not support anything this tuner has to offer outside of ATSC and NTSC and it cannot recognize it as both at once without a registry hack.  There was a good How-to on that subject that got Media Center to do it.  This shouldn’t be necessary but it is.  Many TV tuners on the market now are hybrid tuners since the government mandate in the US to switch over to all digital broadcasting.  You can find the tutorial here.  If you follow it right, it works like a charm for the ATI TV Wonder 600 USB and it says it works for the ATI TV Wonder 650 USB.

If you find any other problems with Media Center, let me know, even if you haven’t found a solution.