Andres

Comment #1584 from Andres [Reply]

I hate to even ask but does this work on the extender? Is there any way in your future posts you can comment on extender compatibility?

Michael Healy

@Reply #1585 from Michael Healy [Reply]

This won’t work on extenders as far as I know. The plug-in is basically just a Media Center interface for FFDShow which can’t be run on an extender.

tylor

Comment #1586 from tylor [Reply]

Really frustrated that this won’t work on an extender as I thought it may bridge a gap I am having in terms of MKV streaming (audio sync) being slightly out :-<

There doesnt seem to be a way to rectify this until the divx projet goes 64bit…

Alton

Comment #1589 from Alton [Reply]

I love the website, but it seems to mainly be focused on HTPC’s with Media Center not user using extenders as much. It wold be great if in the future you could always talk about or note extender compatibility that would be great.

I know many user are like myself and only use extenders.

Jason

Comment #1602 from Jason [Reply]

Agreed. We all continue to see these “great” add-ons for Media Center… locally. The whole point of the MCE is for distributed media across multiple locations. If you want to do local stuff, just use Media Player.

In the future, I would also agree that it would be much better if there was a listing as to extender support up front.

PeeBee

Comment #1604 from PeeBee [Reply]

Does anyone use FFDShow post processing on livetv? If so what settings do you use? I’m using sat-tv as a source and I receive mostly SD in MPEG2

Michael Healy

@Reply #1608 from Michael Healy [Reply]

I haven’t tried using FFDShow post-processing on live TV. If you give it a try let me know how it works out for you. Post-proc can add quite a bit of load on the CPU.

PatrickOttery

Comment #1615 from PatrickOttery [Reply]

Has anyone been able to get this to work in 7MC x64?
I followed the MKV for minimalists guide and am having two issues. Firstly, I could not get the gabest matroska splitter to register correctly, only the x86 version. I run my command prompt as an admin and run regsvr32 from c:\windows\syswow64. I get a success message, but when I use graphstudio to check my codecs & filters, etc, it does not list the x64 version at all. I tried totally removing the x86 version, rebooting and then re-registering the x64 version, but I still got the same results.
That’s problem number 1.

Problem number 2…no matter what MKV splitter I use, I am not sure how to get it paired with ffdshow video, to take advantage of Media Control…that is all I really want to do here

I was considering renaming the Microsoft MPEG2 codec to force the Gabest one to take hold, but this does not appear to be an issue of filter merit…although I could be wrong. I consider myself a reasonably knowledgable computer geek (20 years as a hobbyist) but this codec stuff has been one of the hardest things to get my head around.

If anyone can offer help, it would be greatly appreciated. Media Control is almost the final step in getting my HTPC to really rock along!

Cheers,

Pat.

Michael Healy

@Reply #1617 from Michael Healy [Reply]

I’m sure you are already but make sure you’re using the 64-bit Graphstudio when checking 64-bit codecs. Also, you’ll need a 64-bit MKV splitter. Since you’re having trouble with Gabest’s splitters I would suggest Haali’s 64-bit which you can find here.

No matter which splitter you decide on however it should use whichever codec has the highest merit by default unless it’s using the WMF preferred codec registries which you can set with Media Control.

It’s a little late here so I’m probably forgetting something but codecs are one of the hardest things I’ve come across to master.

PatrickOttery

Comment #1748 from PatrickOttery [Reply]

Hi, thanks for the reply, I hadn’t had a chance to get back to you yet.
I’m now using the shark007 codec pack (as well as the 64 bit pack) but I still don’t know how to get ffdshow tied in properly here. I have ffdshow’s merit set as high as it can go.
I think I need to take ownership and rename/delete the WMF codecs before it will work…I might play around with that now.
Can someone explain the difference between a splitter and a codec as well please? Does the splitter just ’split’ a portion of the stream (i.e. video stream one) and then the decoder decodes it?
Bah, so many questions, so much confusion…I’ll get there eventually!

Cheers,

Pat.

Michael Healy

@Reply #1750 from Michael Healy [Reply]

That’s right, a splitter splits the video into various streams: video, audio and subtitles. Then each stream is loaded by the codec decoder.

Have you tried out the DirectShow Prefered Filter Tool to set the decoder you’d like to use?

PatrickOttery

Comment #1766 from PatrickOttery [Reply]

Thanks for that. Over the course of trying to get this working in the neat manner I would like, I have tried almost every scraper, filter, codec, tweaker, player that exists and I’ve definitely missed the usefulness of some tools along the way because I didn’t understand when & how to use them.
I think I’m pretty much sorted now, my MKV’s now play in 7MC via ffdshow which is the main issue, I still have a few files that won’t play at all, but I think I can now at least use graphstudio and some tweaking to work out how to get things 100%.

Thanks again for your help…it has been, um, err…helpful

Pat.

Eric

Comment #1782 from Eric [Reply]

I’m also having issues with using media control in W7×64, I have tried all the decoder prefer tools but W7 won’t switch from using WMF…just curious if anyone has been able to change their codecs to ones they want. I have ffdshow x64, haali x64 installed, thanks for any help!

ssalsekki

Comment #1864 from ssalsekki [Reply]

To Eric and Patrick,

Here is what i did to get all my shit to work after 2 weeks of frustration. I ran these steps from a fresh install of window 7201 32bit. I am able to play all my downloaded movies files in any encoded format from WMP12 or 7MC running off of FFDSHOW video/audio. My live tv playback works smoothly off of the powerdvd9 decoder. I am no expert by any means so take this with a grain of salt.

Specs: 4850E CPU, 780G mobo, 4gb ddr2 800.

1. Install FFDShow Tryouts (Ensure that you uncheck the H264 support!) FFDshow video H264 decoding is a pure software decoder which is very taxing on your CPU.
2. Run MCDU (Media Center Decoder Utility, set both video and audio defaults to FFDShow). This will rename your msmpeg2vdec.dll and msmpeg2adec.dll files which is necessary but NOT the only step to overriding the native m$ codecs for WMP and 7MC.
3. Run the Preferred Filter Tools and set all playback options except for H264 to FFDShow
4. Follow all the exact steps in the “Replacing without breaking live tv guide…”
5. Manually renamed the MP3DMOD.dll to MP3DMOD.dll.bak located inside system32 folder. This will disable the m$ native MP3DMO decoder from overriding all other codecs.
6. Follow all the exact steps in the “Disable and Replace MS DTS/DVD playback guide”
7. IMPORTANT: do not change the mspreferredaudiodecoder registry! I found that once you change this all your movie files stop working! Do not worry i found that even without this registry change 7MC still uses ffdshow audio, so this change seems pointless. In case you changed it accidentally already here is the vanilla setting: {E1F1A0B8-BEEE-490D-BA7C-066C40B5E2B9}.
8. Lastly use RadLights Filter Manager and set the merits to the highest for FFDShow audio and video. Then set powerDVD9 to second highest merit. The logic here is that ffdshow video will try to decode first and if it cant(the only one it cannot should be H264 since you disabled it when installing in step 1) it will pass the decoding task to powerdvd9.

Eric

@Reply #1872 from Eric [Reply]

Thanks for the help but it’s different when running x64 stuff….and I could care less about the TV stuff…I think I’m going to just stick with the WMF stuff and add in MKV…since doing the switch to ffdshow for everything, I have that movie resuming no longer works and the fast forward settings don’t work either; I’m going to just set the the FF and RW intervals to higher settings and live with it…dont get me wrong, I appreciate the help, just kinda fed up with all the tweaking

Karl

@Reply #2691 from Karl [Reply]

ssalsekki,

What is your live tv source? Are you using CableCard? From what i can tell, switchting to anything other than the native WMC7 codec breaks live TV if you are using a cable card. Analog TV works fine, but anything digital gives a DRM related nasty gram.

Has anyone seen otherwise?

ssalsekki

Comment #2956 from ssalsekki [Reply]

Not using a cable card. I am hooked up to Time Warner cable via Clear QAM using a Hauppage Tuner.

Im no expert on cable cards but i dont see how not using Win7’s native codecs will break. The cable card should have no dependency on the video/audio codecs? I thought it was simply a piece of hardware that has the decryption algorithm inside to decrypt the scrambled QAM signal.

Curtis

Comment #4262 from Curtis [Reply]

Hi there, love the site and especially Media Control and ffdshow, which I have used for quite some time successfully in Windows Vista.

I have now switched to Windows 7 though and am having a problem. My media centre is actually also my main computer, so when I load up media centre I have to switch my sound device from my local computer speakers to my surround sound system over SPDIF. In Vista I just used Media Control to do this with my remote control right in Media Centre, never having to get up off my couch. In Windows 7, this feature doesn’t seem to work. When I go to change the audio device, it has one selected that isn’t even enabled (the HDMI one in my ATI video card which I do not use), and then when I try to select SPDIF, it asks me to restart Media Centre but then does not actually change the device. It opens up the control panel window on my computer monitor, but never actually changes the device like it did in Vista.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated, this is quite frustrating.

A better solution would be to have Media Centre always default to using my SPDIF and everything else on my computer default to my computer speakers. Is there a tool for that?

Thanks!