Vista Media Center

I've recently switched my Media Center box to Windows Vista Media Center.  It's working well for the most part, but it took some work to get it there.  I wanted to reduce the number of utilities and codecs installed as much as possible, and go for free/open software wherever possible.  My biggest problem at this point is that performance just isn't really there.  I went from a 1GHz machine to a 2.4 GHz machine, yet the video seizes up fairly frequently and tears whenever there's lateral movement.  I think the NVidia drivers just aren't there yet, which is crazy considering that Vista has already been out several months.  In case it helps anyone, here's my setup:

Set DVD Library to play DVD folders

It turns out that by default, you can't navigate into a DVD folder (if you are the type of who rips DVD's to the hard drive).  It just displays the VIDEO_TS folder and won't play anything.  The feature to autoplay DVD's is still there, just not enabled.  Make this change in the registry to enable it:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings

Change ShowGallery from Play to Gallery.

Restart Media Center then you'll see DVD Library next to recorded tv.

My Movies

[from their site] "My Movies for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition is the ultimate movie collection management and playback tool. With My Movies you are able to index your movies with automatically downloaded data from the internet, and then browse movies, actors, directors and much more. You can share your movie database to multiple clients, and configure each client to its own parental control limitation, and require pin # to view the full collection."

I like My Movies, though I wish that it worked in a more automated fashion.  You need to exit Media Center and performs lots of clicking to get movies added.  Part of the problem is that it can't always find a good match for the DVD, but it would be nice if this improves over time.

http://www.mymovies.name/

A variety of audio/video decoders (codecs)

[from their site] "ffdshow is a DirectShow and VFW codec for decoding/encoding many video and audio formats, including DivX and XviD movies using libavcodec, xvid and other opensourced libraries with a rich set of postprocessing filters."  I don't really trust the codec packs.  Many of them aren't really legal, and many people complain of conflicts.  ffdshow works like a charm and is open source.  Note that a codec won't necessarily read a file format -- it's just for decoding the actual video and audio.  It that A/V data is in an AVI container, you're set, otherwise you'll need to decode the container too...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow

Decoding file container formats
Extension: mp4 (Video/Audio), m4a (Audio), m4p (DRM-protected audio)
Description: .MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a container format for multimedia streams (audio, video, subtitles, etc). m4a is just a way of specifying an audio-only mp4 file.
DirectShow Codec: http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/
This is a filter pack which includes an Mp4 and Matroska splitter. Once an Mp4 file is split, it will use other codecs (probably already included with ffdshow) to play the audio and video portions. Often Mp4 files contain AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) - a lossy encoding audio format touted as the successor to mp3.

Video types

The final step is to let Media Center know that extensions other than AVI/WMV/ASF actually contain video.  This requires a registry change.  Once you've done this, it will know to show the file, and attempt to create a thumbnail.  Of course, there's no point if you can't decode the container or the contained A/V data (see above): 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4]
"PerceivedType"="video"

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