Vista MCE is broken - or I broke it......

General Computing Microsoft Windows
1

I have just rebuilt my HTPC with a core2duo and the board that Damski recommended :thumbsup: which works fine.

Already had 32-bit Vista on it but this performed one of those BSOD routines which Vista doesn’t do any more :rolleyes: on boot. Manual and Microsoft repair routines wouldn’t fix it so reinstall time.

Couldn’t find the original disk but had a copy of Home Premium 64-bit destined for another machine unused so I thought OK slap that on.

Install -painless
Drivers & utilities -painless
Registry hack to work with old Samba servers -painless

So on with the codec packs, point it at videos and mp3 collection and fire up media player. Apart from the usual small codec and association issues all cool.

So this is the thing. Media Player 11 will play any video or mp3 file I have either on double click, Open dialogue, Play dialogue, or Open With dialogue. Windowed, full screen, whatever. Surround sound works, all OK.

Fire up media centre. Mp3 collection is into library and plays fine, screen configured, no TV to configure but everything else works.

Try to play a video file and it won’t. All I get is a blank blue screen with

Cannot Play Video
Windows Media Center cannot open the file

or a similar message but pertaining to codecs.

So, given the files play in Media Player 11, and as far as I know media centre is just a front end to this, what am I missing? It’s got me confused…

2

Same issue as with Microsoft Word and MS Works. Seems OK, but are incompatible without a patch.

3

i had the same issue with mce vista when trying to play videos over a netwokr resource, i put it down to speed of transfere for the files would play fine when stored locally?

4

Network performance is 13-14MB/sec on file copy, copied file to desktop and same result. Also noticed Media Centre has no thumbnails for these in library nor does it seem to generate any. Downloading an updated Nvidia diver now just to see if it makes any difference.

5

I’ll have a tinker when I get home, I haven’t got my HD content mapped to the MCE but I’ll do it as a bit of fault diagnosis. I have a few diferinf file types too so will be interesting to see which ones show up.

6

Cheers matey, latest NVidia driver does nothing but mess up my system so off it comes, back to old one. This is really strange - my other HTPC running XP-MCE plays all the same files over the network no bovver, as did this one on Vista 32-bit :confused:

Edit: Right got a working driver 158.24, installed but it did not fix the problem just smoothed playback. MC will play some video files but only Windows Audio/Video files (WMV). No external formats will play.

So I’m guessing on 64 bit the Media Player and Media Center don’t share codecs? Let me guess, Media Center needs super dooper 64 bit codecs which it stores in a special sooper dooper directory? Cos WMP11 is playing ALL files and must therefore be looking elsewhere for its codecs.

Edit2: Googled my hunch… Windows Vista 64 runs the 32 bit player as default, and so unlike Windows XP (OR VISTA 32 BIT) Media Player and Media Center are chalk & cheese. So I’m stuffed. It’s crap like this that reminds me why I hate Microsft so much - how is an average home user ever going to work this out??? And why on earth does it not at least TELL YOU that you are running 32bit Media Player??? Wasted my whole sodding day on this rubbish !!!

7

There’s a 64-bit version of the k-lite codec pack, it’s still in beta but it seems to work for Media Centre ok.

8

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/VistaCodecs-x64Components-Download-67012.html seems to work too, and has tools to switch between 32 & 64 bit players as default. Its fixed all the video issues, haven’t got any other sound output than PCM stereo yet but that may be down to configuration. At least something is fixed - if the program wasn’t set up like this finding the solution would have been easy.

9

ahh, so me not running 64bit OS is not going to help you at all then, oh well, but I did discover that I can’t play WMV’s from within mce, well Ican, but I get no sound, my amp won’t support wmv9 direct input, so it’s trying to pump the sound out and I get nothing, if I play an ac3 track it works fine, if I play the same WMV from media player it just downmixes it. I need to play with the codec set ups to get this to work, Mojo, you may be in the same boat.