Welcome to the first Reader Q&A session of June! This week we have a number of great questions from our readers on a wide range of topics. Streaming radio, playing iso files, Cyberlink codecs and subtitles are all covered this week. Thanks to everyone who sends in their questions and if you’ve got one you’d like to send in just use the form following the post!

Question #1 from stavarotti

Currently, is there any way to stream online radio stations in mediacenter? Webmedia is not available, and that is what i used on vista to stream online radios to both wmc and my extenders. Any help will be appreciated. Oh, additionally, i tried creating individuals .mcl files and using radio stations added through WMP12, however they do not work on the extender. Thanks.

Answer

There is a plug-in available for streaming shoutcast radio stations called mcShoutcast. It’s a paid plug-in ($10) but there’s a two week trial version available and is well worth the money. The plug-in is regularly updated and has a very rich feature set, especially for a streaming radio plug-in. It allows for favorites, artist info, lyrics and works on extenders as well.

Unfortunately at this point there are no plug-ins for other services such as Last.FM and with Last.FM begining to charge users for API access it’s unlikely that one will appear in the near future.

Question #2 from Mo Heb

Can I play iso files in media center?

Answer

Yes, the Media Browser plug-in allows you to load and playback ISO files by mounting them in Daemon Tools. You’ll need to install both Media Browser and Daemon Tools then use the Media Browser configuration tool to set the location of the Daemon Tools software. However, I’m unsure of the status of Daemon Tools for Windows 7 as in earlier betas the program didn’t work properly and alternate programs were the only option.

Question #3 from Mitch King

Ive read the tutorial on how to get Win7MC to use the new Cyberlink PDVD 9 Codecs as the default for TV and DVD playback. I assumed this tutorial was created because the old Vista Decoder Utility would not work in W7. My question is, I have followed the tutorial and everything seems fine, except I cannot see any of the improvements to the video Cyberlink featured in their decoder. Such as up-scaling and refresh rate changes. Is it possible to get these to work in 7MC or will I only get the basic features of PDVD 9. if this is the case, I will undo my changes for the sake of not fixing something that wasn’t broken. HUGE congrats on a fantastic site. It has been so helpful you have no idea!

Answer

Once you’ve setup playback to use Cyberlink to can set the basic defaults by using Filter Manager but you won’t get the more advanced features of the Cyberlink codec. These features aren’t a part of the codec itself and are only available in the actual Cyberlink software.

Question #4 from John

I download a lot of shows from the internet, the subs are in srt file format, I have converted them into smi (which is microsoft’s default subtitle format). They play well in WMP. but they dont load at all into WMC 7 is there another way to load these subtitles? or a setting that has to be configured? Thanks

Answer

Setting up subtitles will depend on your codec setup. You may want to try installing DirectVobSub. For most people this will get subtitles working in almost any situation. If you are running FFDShow you can also check out this guide to setting up subtitles.

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