Windows Decoder Check
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:59:45 +0000
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I’m finally happy with my HTPC project. I’ve got all my movies, videos, pictures, and music on the 1.5TB hardware RAID5 that I setup (3x 750gb WD Caviar Blacks). I can watch, record, and timeshift TV. It’s working great! I’m actually quite happy with Windows 7 (surprisingly). Only a few problems remain…
The (hopefully) last major remaining problem I managed to solve last night. I’ve been watching the 5th season of Lost (after getting it playing using Shark007’s Codec Pack). These were 720p HD H264 mkvs and played fine. However, another set of videos encoded with Xvid and refused to play in Media Center but would play in Media Player.
Media Center’s error was: Cannot Play Video: Windows Media Center cannot open the file. Wow, such a descriptive error message.
I tried searching for logs to see if I could get more information about the error, but had no luck with this.
I tried all sorts of configuration utilities but nothing seemed to work.
I finally stumbled upon an article on the Hack Windows 7 Media Center site that talks about the Media Center Decoder Utility (MCDU). This tool lets one select the default audio and video decoders. When I ran it, there was apparently no default audio decoder selected. I selected ‘Microsoft DTV-DVD’ as the default for for both audio and video. After clicking ‘Set Defaults’ and restarting Media Center,
Note: I had previously followed another Hack7MC article that had me ‘Take Ownership’ of the file C:\Windows\system32\MP3DMOD.dll and append .bak to the file name. I had to rename this file back before using MCDU. Apparently MCDU is actually a nice GUI front end for renaming this file and setting some registry values that correspond to the defaults for the audio and video decoders.
So check out MCDU if you are having decoder problems, it might just fix your problems!
My last remaining issue is with audio, specifically with mute. It works with my remote as expected initially, but after some unknown event, the mute button refuses to have any effect. If you’ve managed to fix this, please let me know how!