I’ve been using an old Vista machine as a media center for a long time. It’s not great spec, so I use CoreAVC to playback HD content. Firstly, here’s a little background on the setup:

AMD Athlon FX57 processor (2.8ghz)
2GB RAM
ATI Radeon x850
1TB external drive with all my content

I plug it into my TV using a VGA cable and stereo audio (my TV is a Samsung LCD) as the graphics card doesn’t support HDMI sound bridging. I decided that I’d upgrade to Windows 7 to hopefully get a bit more performance and get the latest version of windows media center. I know that as this is a ‘linux’ blog, I should probably go for MythTV or XBMC on linux, but as the pc is used to play back things for my wife and 2 year old daughter, I wanted it to be as easy as possible.

So, I’d expected the windows 7 set up to be easy – I know a bit about codecs etc.. and usually just install the K-Lite pack (say what you want about codec packs, I’ve heard it all before and know what I’m doing – it works!) and then CoreAVC, and set ffdshow to not decode HD streams and leave it to coreavc. This works fine in Vista, so I expected it to work just as easily in Win7 – I was wrong!

Installing windows 7 was easy, it was a clean install. I then made sure I had drivers for everything, and installed all my usual ‘media oriented’ apps.

I know that Windows 7 includes decoders for h264 ,xvid, divx etc.. so decided firstly to give it a try and see if it would work without any extra codecs. Normal avi’s (xvid) worked flawlessley and I was happy to see that Win7 media center is capable of rewinding and fastforwarding them! I went to play an HD file to be told that the file type isn’t supported!

It seems that whilst h264 does natively work, a splitter is needed to play mkv files. I installed haali for this purpose and tried again. HD playback dropped frames and was choppy, even on 720p.

Now, I know that Windows 7 likes to lock playback down to the native decoders and doesn’t play nicely with CoreAVC. I found a brilliant guide to tweak the registry to force CoreAVC to be the preferred decoder here. This is a direct cut and paste of the steps to get CoreAVC to be set as the preferred decoder:

1. Open REGEDIT as an Administrator
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectShow\Preferred
3. Right click on ‘Preferred’ and select ‘Permissions’.
4. Click on ‘Advanced’ -> ‘Owner’ tab. ‘Administrators’ , check ‘Replace Owner on subcontainers and objects’ checkbox, OK.
5. Now back to the first window – click ‘Administrators’ and check ‘Full Control’. Press OK.
6. In the left pane look for {e06d8026-db46-11cf-b4d1-00805f6cbbea}
{31435641-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71}.
7. Edit these entries with a double click and replace the value data entry with that for CoreAVC – {09571A4B-F1FE-4C60-9760-DE6D310C7C31}.
8. Reboot. This is important.

That’s it, now windows media player and media center will use CoreAVC as the decoder for mkv’s. Everything worked fine until I noticed that some of my media didn’t have any sound. I tested it in media player and had no sound so realised it was obviously a codec issue. I opened the file with GSpot and found that the audio codec on the silent files was DTS. As I hadn’t installed K-Lite on this install, I decided to install AC3Filter and as soon as it was installed, everything worked fine. Windows 7 also had ‘real’ support for my TV (automatically setting the desktop to the native resolution and in device manager it shows as a Samsung LCD), and has noticably better picture quality, especially on HD. I’d always found VGA to be a bit washed out on Vista and just assumed it was because I was using VGA instead of a digital connection. On Windows 7, the quality is comparable to Sky+HD over HDMI.

Now that it’s all working, I’ll recommend a few useful addons for media center:

Media Center Studio – Allows you to customise the interface, including the ability to add/remove icons.
BBC iPlayer addon – Lets you watch iPlayer content, and it looks like a native media center app.
Heatwave - I haven’t actually used this, but I’ve been recommended it, and it looks like a great weather app.
My Movies – The best movie catalogue app for media center, bar none!

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