Welcome back to another edition of Reader Q & A here on Hack7MC. Hopefully you had an excellent weekend with the Independence Day celebrations here in the U.S and Canada Day last week in Canada.

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Now let’s get down to the questions!

Question #1 from Ryan

Is there any way to start Media Center directly into Media Browser? In other words, I want Media Browser to launch automatically when I start Media Center.

Answer

Well that depends on how you are launching Media Center. If you are launching the program via the remote’s green button then you’ll need to use a program to intercept the remote commands and reassign the actions. We’ll be covering a few of these programs shortly here on Hack7MC.

If you are launching Windows 7 Media Center via a shortcut you can alter the shortcut to load directly into Media Browser. Open the properties window for the shortcut by right-clicking the icon and selecting properties. Then enter the following into the target box: %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /entrypoint:{ce32c570-4bec-4aeb-ad1d-cf47b91de0b2}\{fc9abccc-36cb-47ac-8bab-03e8ef5f6f22}

Press OK to save the changes. Now each time you use this shortcut to launch Media Center it will open up directly into Media Browser.

Question #2 from Spontex

I would like to convert some WTV recordings in high definition (H264) and multi-channel to an open standard (e.g. hi-def multi-channel MKV or standard-def DVD-Video or XVid). Is this possible? Thanks

Answer

There are currently a couple of ways to convert WTV into MKV that we’ve covered here on Hack7MC. Each method takes some work to accomplish since the format is still relatively new however. One method is to use the latest beta of MCEBuddy to convert your WTV files to one of the supported formats.

The other way is to setup DVRMSToolbox to do the conversion which may be difficult since I don’t believe there is a premade profile for accomplishing the process at this point. You may want to look into the WTV to DVR-MS profiles created by abuttino which could help you through the process.

Question #3 from mor

One of the most frequent question we have about 7MC is how to show external subtitles (srt,sub) in it.  I am using WIN7 32BIT, with the latest FFDSHOW INSTALLED with SUBTITLES ENABLED. (i also installed the gabest splitter after your post mkv for minimalist). Now I understand that the problem is with WMP127MC loading their default codec which doesn’t support sub srt subtitles. 
I tried changing preferred DirectShow filters in Windows 7 using Doom9 "Tool for changing preferred DirectShow filters" after reading about it here and also using the MCDU tools after you suggested it in a replay to someone with no success …
the file i using is a standard :
Video: XviD
Resolution: 624×352 23.97fps
with an external SRT file which works perfectly in VLC 
I also tried posting few questions on the subject in few forums and found no answer, any idea how to fix the problem??
thanks.

Answer:

You are correct that the problem here is most likely the use of Microsoft’s native codecs not supporting the srt format but forcing it’s way into the decoding process. The best solution is to use a subtitle decoder that will load alongside these default codecs and process subtitles. There is a recently published guide here on Hack7MC that details using DirectVobSub in this situation to enable subtitles to be loaded without altering the default codecs.

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