Comments on: Advanced codec support inside Media Center with Media Control

By: Curtis

Curtis — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:03:34 +0000

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!

By: ssalsekki

ssalsekki — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:20:53 +0000

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.

By: Karl

Karl — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:17:01 +0000

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?

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:15:08 +0000

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

By: ssalsekki

ssalsekki — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:21:05 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:00:25 +0000

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!

By: PatrickOttery

PatrickOttery — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:15:04 +0000

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.

By: Michael Healy

Michael Healy — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:16:46 +0000

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?

By: PatrickOttery

PatrickOttery — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:46:52 +0000

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.

By: Michael Healy

Michael Healy — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:07:46 +0000

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.