My Windows Media Center Vista Experience

[sarlen]

I wanted to try Vista for my Multi Media PC. I had seen the Vista Media Center interface in the store and was pretty impressed so I picked up Vista Premium at Wal-Mart. My intention is to eventually have a HTPC to sit in my entertainment center but for now I’m content to set it up on my spare PC to try to get all the functions I want in the HTPC to work.

The music:
Setting up my mp3 collection in WMC (Windows Media Center) was a snap, told it what folder to look in and it added them all. I started to browse the collection and started to notice the issues. I had tagged all of my music using Music Match Jukebox now Yahoo Jukebox (fucking sellouts) and apparently Media player didn’t like the tags so it re-wrote them all as the music loaded. 64 gig of music with tags. Album names, lyrics, art, artist, all jumbled up. Thank god for backups. Had to set media player 11 to not edit my current tags to keep this from happening the second time. I suspect any collection that was originally ripped and tagged with Media Player would have been fine but who uses that POS?

Imported the collection the second time and it works, for a while. After about half-hour of playing files and making play lists I noticed some of the album art doesn’t match the songs again. I search on line for the issue and sure enough it’s a know bug with WMC. I found a nice hack for the database and got it straight after about 4 hours of reading and trial/error.



Pictures and Video:

For something that should have just worked out of the box I was surprised at the amount of reg edits I had to do to make this work. If the file is not a native M$ file WMC will not play/display it period. After a little research I found the reg hacks and codec to force WMC to display the .mov files my digital camera makes here http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Qui ... native.htm


Playing my ISO’s and VOB’s

If your going to attempt this do your self a favor right up front and download and install “My Movies” and “Daemon Tools”. These 2 programs are a god send and free. The My Movies add on adds a My Movies option to the TV+Movie menu in WMC where you can play your ripped movies from, it displays your movies in a nice list with the cover art. The documentation with the My Movies program down right sucks and took me about an hour of messing with it to figure out you have to configure Daemon tools first before it will work properly. Over all this wasn’t as bad as configuring the music but be sure to disable UAC or Daemon will throw out strange, non-descript errors.


This is as far as I have made it, my TV tuner card has not arrived yet from new egg but I suspect installing it will introduce another dozen or so hacks to make it all work as well. If your looking for good resources on WMC I listed below a few of the sites I have found with worthwhile information on them.



http://thegreenbutton.com/
http://www.mymovies.name/forum.aspx?g=forum

[Animalor]

Err, with the codec installed, Vista Media Center will do DivX, Xvid, AC3 audio, you name it, it'll do it. It won't do MOV or Real video cause those formats aren't playable in Windows Media Player but anything else should work just fine.