There comes a time when everyone needs a few good tools to take care of any potential problems that arise in their Media Center setup. Today we’d like to introduce the Hack7MC Troubleshooting Toolbox. This handy collection of free tools will help you get through any problems you might encounter in your everyday Media Center experience. Hopefully, this collection of [...]
Sometimes we might need to find out exactly what set of tools was used to encode a video file. Maybe you would like to double-check the output bitrate of your encoding tools or the output resolution. Perhaps a friend did your encoding and you’d like to double check his workmanship. Could be that you stumbled upon the file among the [...]
Sometimes you just need a single Directshow filter, say an MKV splitter to use with the default Windows 7 codecs. Should you install a codec pack when all you need is a single splitter? Absolutely not! Maybe you just need an x64 video decoder capable of hardware acceleration. There’s no reason to download something you don’t need to get the [...]
Although programs like GraphStudio can help us find out what’s going wrong during the playback of our media files, it isn’t really the easiest way to fix the problems.This is where a program like Radlight’s Filter Manager can come in handy. Unfortunately, this tool is no longer in development so no x64 version exists but an x86 version can be [...]
This is the second part of a guide on using AC3Filter in Media Center to control SPDIF volume. A common problem among Media Center users with an external digital receiver using SPDIF for output. AC3Filter can solve this problem by controlling the gain on the SPDIF stream before sending it through to the receiver. Now that we have AC3Filter working [...]
There are many choices in the world of codecs (used to play back video and audio on the pc). One of the most popular is FFDShow. While there is already a guide on using FFDShow Audio in Media Center there is the other half to consider as well: FFDShow Video. While we are able to get FFDShow audio to work [...]
At times installing codecs for all your music, movies and what have you seems to be 30% science, 70% voodoo. Fortunately, there is a way to double-check our brew to make sure it’s running the way we originally intended. GraphStudio will allow you to load your media files and show you the codecs being used to render it. It will [...]
