Windows 7 Media Centre Thread

[Hencore]

Where does MC get its album art work from? I'm making sure the mp3 tags are all set up correctly but I still get blank album art for a lot of my albums.

 

[Durzel]

Surely that depends on what OS you want to use? I don't think you can install W7MC on a Vista machine and vice versa, though I could be entirely wrong.

I'm not really fussed about the OS - it's the WMC experience I'm more interested in.

As it turns out I've found out that my TV card (Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350) is completely unsupported in Vista 64bit, which means currently I'm having to use Vista 32bit and have only 3.25GB available (of 4).

 

[Torch [P4]]

finding libraries a bit slow, got them all stored on different drives ie one for music one for movies and 2 for tv series, added them into the relevant sections in wmc on the pc but some of them arent showing up on my 360
when its building do i just leave the pc on to build the library up or do i need to leave the 360 on as well?

also my wmp is having a bit of an issue monitoring the music drive

is this just time related due to the size of the drives do you think? (they are rather large, in some cases over 100Gb's of data)

 

[Spider]

Windows 7 lets you merge like channels from different tuners so you can tell it, for example, that BBC1 is available on either Freeview or Freesat - very neat.

Hmmm...How do you do that? Or can you only do it with tuners on the same physical card?

 

[Mystique]

Where does MC get its album art work from? I'm making sure the mp3 tags are all set up correctly but I still get blank album art for a lot of my albums.

Windows Media Player/Centre usually get their album art from folder.jpg files. I've never found that it's 100% reliable though, so I always embed my album art into the mp3 files themselves, as well as having folder.jpg files. I loaded up Media Centre 7 the other day and it sucessfully loaded album art for the 200+ albums I have, so I'd recommend doing that .

 

[Furton]

Well I know you have to muck about with the registry in XP MCE but I was sure you had to do it in VMC too.

Nope, install codecs and it works

 

[Vertigo]

Hmmm...How do you do that? Or can you only do it with tuners on the same physical card?

Nope they don't have to be the same card.

Go into settings and edit the channels. Select one of the channels (say BBC1 at ch.101 on Freesat) and then change the guide listings source to be the same as the other channel which carries the same content (so BBC1 at ch.1 on Freeview for example). This will merge the channels and 101 will disappear from the guide. Whenever you watch or record on channel 1, it will know that this channel is also available on the Freesat tuner on channel 101 and can use that source instead.

You can even set the priority of the channels if you prefer it to get the channel from one tuner whenever possible.

 

[juno_first]

Im just getting into HTPC.
Using w7 32 b7022.
The following reg-edits are usefull:
Dont know if all the below is required as I just exported my reg.

ITV HD:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\TVConfig]
"iVideoSource"=dword:00000004
"iConfigured"=dword:00000001
"iConfiguredFor"=dword:00000001
"iAtscVideoSource"=dword:ffffffff
"iBroadcastStandard"=dword:ffffffff
"fHasSTB"=dword:ffffffff
"fHasDVB"=dword:ffffffff
"fAtscOnly"=dword:ffffffff
"fAllowDvbsMHEG"=dword:00000001
"fPbdaConfigured"=dword:00000000
"iSqmStbFinishedSetup"=dword:00000001
"iSqmStbCount"=dword:00000000
"iSqmStbLearningUsed1"=dword:ffffffff
"iSqmStbSelectedFromList1"=dword:ffffffff
"iSqmStbType"=dword:ffffffff
"iSqmStbCodeSet1"=dword:ffffffff
"iSqmStbUseEnter1"=dword:ffffffff
"iSqmStbTwoIdenticalBoxes"=dword:ffffffff
"Version"="65537"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\TVConfig\Recorders]
"Scanned"=dword:00000001
"Disable"=dword:00000000
"Version"="65537"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\TVConfig\Recorders\732e0955-64ca-4ae4-8cb2-791791f5da4f]
"CableCardSeen"=dword:00000000
"Version"="65537"

Run MCE on bootup:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"Sidebar"="C:\\Program Files\\Windows Sidebar\\sidebar.exe /autoRun"
"mcetv"=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
00,25,00,5c,00,45,00,48,00,4f,00,4d,00,45,00,5c,00,45,00,48,00,53,00,48,00,\
45,00,4c,00,4c,00,2e,00,45,00,58,00,45,00,20,00,2f,00,48,00,4f,00,4d,00,45,\
00,50,00,41,00,47,00,45,00,3a,00,56,00,69,00,64,00,65,00,6f,00,46,00,75,00,\
6c,00,6c,00,73,00,63,00,72,00,65,00,65,00,6e,00,2e,00,58,00,4d,00,4c,00,20,\
00,2f,00,50,00,55,00,53,00,48,00,53,00,54,00,41,00,52,00,54,00,50,00,41,00,\
47,00,45,00,3a,00,54,00,52,00,55,00,45,00,20,00,00,00

I have an ongoing issue with codecs though & thats the H.264 MCE uses as Id like to use Cyberlinks as it uses purevideo. I installed PowerDVD8 I forced media player classic to use the cyberlink codec & the image quality is better. A shame theres no sharpenning, even when setting the driver to 100%. Two challenges that need addressing now: increase sharpness in cyberlink codec & get MCE to use cyberlink codec in all video playback. easy... lol hmm
Theres an ongoing thread about this at the green button:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/2/332957/ShowThread.aspx

EDIT: Ps does anyone know how to get MCE music menu to show songs like the video menu does, ie. songs in folders & not all dumped on-screen?

 

[wolvers]

^^great info, thanks ^^

 

[wolvers]

Nope they don't have to be the same card.

Go into settings and edit the channels. Select one of the channels (say BBC1 at ch.101 on Freesat) and then change the guide listings source to be the same as the other channel which carries the same content (so BBC1 at ch.1 on Freeview for example). This will merge the channels and 101 will disappear from the guide. Whenever you watch or record on channel 1, it will know that this channel is also available on the Freesat tuner on channel 101 and can use that source instead.

You can even set the priority of the channels if you prefer it to get the channel from one tuner whenever possible.

That's ace and just shows how much better this version of Media Centre is. Proper support for dual tuners that is well thought out. I also think it shows how much better it is than stuff like media portal that look nice but doesn't cut it when it comes to TV stuff.

 

[Glaucus]

In one of the htpc threads, someone set it up to something very similar to media portal. Can anyone find it or no what he did?

 

[Holwill]

Was he using the Vanilla theme build of Video Browser?

http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/

If you look in the forums under "general discussion" and the "Vanilla theme" I think this may be what your looking for. There is a offcial build with this fully implemented in the next day or two.

 

[Lanz]

I finally setup my Win7 x86 7057 install last night, and I'm very happy with it (Dual DVB-T and 1 DVB-S)

It took a while to figure out how to get 50hz going using the crappy cat beta drivers, but now its all setup, I'm very pleased.

Just need to sort out Sleep modes and minor stuff now.

 

[huntjules]

Anyone tested windows 7 with the Linksys DMA 2100 / 2200 MCE..?

[ello, anyone tested the linksys DMA2100/2200 MCE's.. do they also work with windows 7? any compatibility issues?

cheers

 

[wolvers]

Finally got around to having a bit more of a play with 7MC last night
(now that the HTPC build is finished and the boiler's fixed!) and in particular mkv playback. As I'm running it in 64-bit I couldn't use the exact same codecs that I'm using in Vista and in the end settled for these.

http://shark007.net/win7codecs.html

For 64-bit install this after that one.

http://shark007.net/x64components.html

I'm not usually keen on codec packs but this one is quite slim and mirrors the codecs that I use in Vista. A full install got my mkv files playing straight away, although I had to change some settings to get DTS bitstream working.

 

[wolvers]

After a bit of messing around trying to find the ITVHD channel (it was a different channel number than peeps had said) and doing the reg change I managed to get it working in time for the second half of the footy.

Looks really good on the projector (as good as BBCHD) which is good as ITV has the worst PQ of all IMO. Man, Capello is really wrinkly!!

It's just a shame that you have to view BBCHD first otherwise you get no picture. Also there wasn't any 5.1 DD like on Sky Sports HD footy matches, just 2ch DD, which is a bit of a shame.

 

[wolvers]

Quick update. I've switched to the 7068 build of Windows7 so I thought I'd just post any changes that I find.

The intro is a little different and the sounds have been changed. I'm not sure if I like the new sounds but maybe they'll take a bit of getting used to.

I think the guide listings are in a much better order now right from the start. The process of re-ordering them is still a long one though.

There's also a slide show screen saver which I think is new but it only seems to work in full screen mode and I can't seem to get a screen shot of that.

Also pleased to find that the red button works although I think that worked on build 7000 as well.

 

[Vertigo]

Seen loads of reports of people having problems installing PlayReady on the 7068 build. Gonna stick with the original beta for my testing for now I think and hang on for the proper RC due later in May.

 

[wolvers]

Seen loads of reports of people having problems installing PlayReady on the 7068 build. Gonna stick with the original beta for my testing for now I think and hang on for the proper RC due later in May.

Yeah, I've had that message appear. I can't get ITVHD working on this build either.

There's also some other software that I use for video capture that doesn't work in Win7 yet, and TMT2 doesn't either, so I won't be switching to Win7 full time until they do.

Quick shot of my movie section which looks much better than Vista. What a shame they don't make it look like the Vanilla build of Media Browser though.

 

[Django x2]

In one of the htpc threads, someone set it up to something very similar to media portal. Can anyone find it or no what he did?

Hey mate, was it me?

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=13515292&postcount=367

and

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=13515314&postcount=368