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. Read more