Free Codecs for MCE2005

Butters · 30 Dec 2007 at 00:31

I will be moving to Vista myself but someone I am knocking a MCE2005 test box up for wants to keep the XP feel. :rolleyes:

Dont ask.

Anyway, you cant play DVDs through MCE2005 without a 3rd party codec and things like FFDshow, etc don't work. I've found a good one by Nvidia (its pure Video) but you have to pay for it and also its an ATI gfx card (not that that should matter).

So, what do you use?

Thanks

Conrad11 · 30 Dec 2007 at 01:38

Nvidia PureVideo is for nvidia cards only.

FFDShow should work, have you set it to play dvds?

1337z0r · 30 Dec 2007 at 01:46

Yep FFDShow should work, but you could also try the k-lite codec pack as that also works very well.

Butters · 30 Dec 2007 at 01:48

Umm, how do you set it to play DVDs?

bledd · 30 Dec 2007 at 01:50

get ffdshow from free-codecs.com

mother's life will work

*beer

this_is_gav · 30 Dec 2007 at 09:19

Dscaler should work too.

PureVideo does work on cards other than nV (or did a year or so back), but you'll be missing any hardware acceleration the card and software is capable of supporting.

bledd · 30 Dec 2007 at 11:03

sober now

use ffdshow, and dscaler, will work for tv decoding and dvd and all videos

i take back the mothers life

Borden · 30 Dec 2007 at 12:48

Once you've got one installed, Dscaler always worked for me, then you can download a program from microsoft that will allow you to select the default dvd decoder to make sure it is used in media center.

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...AC-0AB6-4990-943D-627E6ADE9FCB&displaylang=en

Butters · 30 Dec 2007 at 14:29

Ok, this is wierd and annoying!

I'm testing this on a laptop with Ati 9600 mobility radeon. I've done this before ages ago and all worked fine. This time, I'm getting a message when you try to open MCE2005 which says

"Your video card or drivers are not compatible with Media Center."

If you press OK, Media Center loads with no issues.

Also, even though I have FFDShow, it still wont play videos in MCE with the usual error, even though I have gone in to ffdshow and enabled mpeg2 with one from the drop down, I'm still having problems.

Any ideas?

One thing I've never understood with MCE2005 is how something that can play in WMP10/11 cannot play in MCE. How stupid is that?

this_is_gav · 30 Dec 2007 at 16:50

Do you have remote control software installed? I've seen that happen after months of having UltraVNC installed, which installs it's own video driver, which for no apparent reason was taking primary control in some ways. Strange.

I solved mine by disabling the Ultra VNC driver in Device Manager, under Display Adapters.

FatRakoon · 30 Dec 2007 at 18:47

I use Korean Media Player and I have not othered to use any form of codec or codec pack for over a year now and given the number of different filetypes I have thrown at it and nothing has ever failed me yet, says a lot... Including DVDs of course.

csmager · 30 Dec 2007 at 18:58

If media center's saying that error, it usually means that when it runs you'll get no visual effects - basically, none of the DirectX stuff works. It can't play video like that.

You might need to find some different drivers for the graphics card. Messing around with codecs isn't going to help. As a general rule, if it plays in WMP, it plays in WMC. WMC uses WMP to play things anyway.

this_is_gav · 30 Dec 2007 at 19:18

csmager said:
As a general rule, if it plays in WMP, it plays in WMC. WMC uses WMP to play things anyway.

They may share the same technology underneath, and in limited instances codecs too, but I've never had WMP stop working, while WMC can be an absolute pain if things aren't just right. See my post above for an example of how one will work fine (WMP) while the other just refuses to play anything animated.