Hello,

I have recently purchased a laptop with Vista Home Premium edition with Media Center included with it. I have also purchased the PowerDVD Ultra to play the movies and stuff.

I am having hard time to link PowerDVD Ultra to media center. Everytime I try to open a DVD or any other Video file, it uses Windows Media Player and gives me a codec missing error.

I would like to know if there is any way that I can get PowerDVD to fire up automatically with Media Center to play all of my video files including the standard DVDs.

Thank you.

PS: Sorry if this is the worng section to post this question, please move it to the correct section if needed.

pretty sure if u want to fire up powerdvd u'd have to launch the program itself first. i'm not familiar with media center itself but i'm sure all the media are launched with MS's programs. i'm surprised your dvd wont play tho, b/c installing powerdvd should have provided the codecs wmp need for dvd playback.

you may want to check htpc area for this question, there should be more ppl there that can answer your question.

Hey jkcheng122, thank you very much for your input. As long as i remember, PowerDVD does not share it's codecs with any other program nor it uses other programs' codecs.

I'm not familiar with the media center edition, but with Powerdvd did you go into the configuration and set which file types associated with Powerdvd? On windows xp this change will make those file types boot up Powerdvd to play them back.
Click the "configuration" button on the Powerdvd player, then go to Player-(Advdanced) button-file associations.....check all file types you want Powerdvd to play.

I'm not familiar with the media center edition, but with Powerdvd did you go into the configuration and set which file types associated with Powerdvd? On windows xp this change will make those file types boot up Powerdvd to play them back.
Click the "configuration" button on the Powerdvd player, then go to Player-(Advdanced) button-file associations.....check all file types you want Powerdvd to play.
it's diff with media center when everything is in a media bar format, and i dont believe there's an option to change the programs that launch what u see on the bar.

Hey David, yes I tried your suggestion but still no luck. I selected PowerDVD to play everysingle file type it supports. PowerDVD automatically fires up and plays the associated files when I am in normal windows mode (such as Divx, Xvid, Mpeg, Avi...etc). However; when I am in windows media center mode, it is trying to use the Windows Media Player to play those files.

Windows Media Center only uses WMP for all video. You *can* download My Movies, which will give you the opportunity to use TheaterTek for your DVDs and *can* use PowerDVD Ultra for BD and HD DVD Playback.

As for your codec error, more than likely you are using something other than the built-in DD Decoder. Download VMCD.exe to change your media center codec. Video can be anything, but audio sometimes demands the MSFT default.

Click on the Windows Icon on the bottom left corner of your screen. Type 'Autoplay' in the search window above that. The search results should have Autoplay listed. Select that and you can change the associations for different content types such as DVD, CD, DVD Audio, Blank DVD, Blank DC, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.