Windows 7 Media Center : Setup Guide, Knowledge Base & Support - Page 54

Useful, thanks for your information.

There is that slider button I think on the top left of the Mini that puts it into MCE mode. Actually I don't know if this is necessarily MCE mode but it activates the trackpad which is what I use to navigate around WMC. I never used the SetPoint software

Ok, I'm stuck again (big surprise). I am trying to use the Music Support plugin for Media Browser. It is working fine, but I don't have any cover art at all. My directory structure is:

F:\\Music\\Mainstream\\\\\\

I also tried:

F:\\Music\\\\\\

and even:

F:\\Music\\\\

but MB does not fetch any cover art.

Is there a certain format that the album name must be in? For example, using my first directory structure, I have:

F:\\Music\\Mainstream\\AC-DC\\Back In Black

Any ideas?

MediaBrowser will not download art for the music plugin, you need to gather separately (folder.jpg and backdrop.jpg). There was an App I was using, trying to search to see if I can still find

MusciArt was the app I was thinking of, but I don't see it on the website - http://www.craigthomas.co.za/

Thanks, dbone!

In case anyone needs it, I found it here:

http://qwontech.webs.com/directdownloads.htm

Edit: Never mind - It doesn't run under Windows 7...

There it is, I was pulling my hair out looking for it!!!

In the Media Browser forum there was a guy named Radeon who wrote a couple of scripts to automatically download folders and backdrops for music files. See here:

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/forum/vie...=5578&start=50

Those links are no longer good...

I tried registering at the forum but I am not getting a confirmation email even though I have requested it about 10 times now. If someone has these scripts would you please PM me, or if not if you have an account at the forum could you post a request for a new download link?

Thanks.

I want to learn. You know the old story - Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for life...

I don't know if we are talking about the same thing. I have a standalone program called "MusicArt", not a plugin (or at least that I can tell). Every time I try to do ANYTHING with it, the program crashes. I have it running just fine on an XP machine, so I got around the problem.

That program is almost as painful as downloading the data manually, so it really isn't much of a help anyway. I was looking for something more like Media Center Master which retrieves all of the data automatically, but it seems that no one has bothered to write such a program. Even MCM could be made to work with music collections if a routine were added that would check music oriented sites for data to download. The scripts that Radeon wrote are probably very simple, but effective in at least fetching one folder.jpg and backdrop.jpg per album as long as the user has his data in the same format that Radeon uses. I am surprised that no one has written such a program, as I will bet that there are a lot more people who have ripped music collections on their hard drives than people with ripped movie collections.

That sure explains a lot. But even though they are leaving the forum there for reference purposes, couldn't they have disabled the new user, login, and logout features so that people like me don't wait for a confirmation email... I found the thread during a Google search, so I had no idea it was a dead forum.

I think the reason though is that for the most part music has never been treated the same way as movies. Most music programs just rely on the ID3 tag, and there are plenty of programs for managing that. There are very few music front ends that require a folder.jpg and a backdrop, which is what the music plugin for media browser uses.

Most everything is working great...I've only found one little bug that I have. Using MPC-HC as my only player, I can play any of my ripped MKV files with no problem. I am bitstreaming DD and DTS audio and decoding multichannel FLAC (that's how I have all of my hi-rez audio stored on the MKVs) using madFLAC decoder...works great!

When I play the actual Blu-ray discs, I have to change one setting in ReClock - I have to check "Accept bitstream formats" and then MPC-HC will bitstream TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, and LPCM without issue. But if I leave "Accept bitstream formats" checked all of the time, when I play my MKV files with FLAC tracks I get a Reclock Initialize Wasapi error that says "Invalid arg!" and when I look at the filter list in MPC-HC it has Reclock Audio Renderer listed twice.

So basically I check the box if I play a Blu-ray disc and uncheck the box if I play MKV files. Is there a more elegant solution so that I don't have to switch ReClock?

Setting a HTPC that is going to be using 7mc & TmT3. Video and audio will be feed to AVR via HDMI from a ATI 5x vid card. Media files will be mkv for DVD and ISO/s for blu-ray. Clone drive handles the mounting of the ISO's.

Do I need to install FFdshow/Shark007`s Win7 Pack to support either HD audio or 1080p video?

thanks

No, you only need ffdshow if you are trying to bitstream HD Audio from a player like MPC HC or the internal WMC player. For TMT there is no need, just make sure you have the ATI HDMI driver installed and not the realtek one.

I should mention for your DVD mkvs to play back in the internal WMC player you will need to install an mkv splitter (either haali or I would recommend just registering MatroskaSplitter.ax)

Nice response, around 2min or so between posts

I hadn't had any issues with playing a mkv in wmc but you got me to thinking. I am testing all of this on my main system. Many things have been installed and tried out. Looks like one of them was Haali Media Splitter.

Had not realized it was required up to this point so thanks. You probably/did save me some pain when I set the HTPC up this weekend

I would definitely try to go as minimal as possible. You could just install Haali and have success, but Haali is a mess for bitstreaming HD Audio from mkvs (but this won't matter for you since your BluRays will be ISOs going through TMT). Good luck getting everything set up and post back once you are up and running

I only have two outstanding issue known at this point concerning how 7mc and Tmt3 are going to behave together.

The first one does not seem to have a good solution and deals with having to choose a player (internal or Tmt3) when ever I select a ISO file to view. Is there any solution for this?

The second one deals with how 7MC defaults to the internal player when viewing mkv dvds. I would rather watch them through TmT3. Is there any solution for this?

Thanks

That would have to be done in the external filters section, right? I don't have any splitter there yet my Blu-ray MKVs seem to be working just fine. Have I just been lucky or do I need to fix this? Doesn't MPC-HC have an internal splitter built in?

Correct, MPC HC has its own internal filters. I was talking about using the internal WMC player (not MPC HC) for mkv playback which would require a splitter (since jrolmstd is only looking to play back DVD mkvs there is no need for bitstreaming so really no need for MPC HC)

If you use a WMC plugin such as Media Browser (highly recommend) you can specify what files you want TMT launched with. Check out the first page here or Greeneyez's HTPC site for how to set up Media Browser.

Tried the MB during my testing on the main PC. It worked well for movies that it correctly identified but has no support for maintaining/changing meta data that I could find. That put me into yet another app to update meta data with.

Ended up going with MyMovies for a more complete and well integration solution. Have some history with it in my early days with the Dune Player. Walked away from it at the time due to issues with maintaining the Dune data.

This time around no dune, straight up media maintenance with a well intergrated collection manager. Only down side is I need MM points to get to the point I can assign an external player to file types. Before I go down that rabbit hole I need to be able to confirm the additional functionality well take care of the menu choice I am trying to avoid.

thanks for the feedback.

I am using WMC with Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1850 (analog from cable and atsc) and Avermedia Duet (qam from cable).

Recently I have noticed my digital channels have a line on the top of the picture. Any idea of what can be causing this? I am using a NVDIA graphics card with latest drivers.

Hey folks,

Been doing good in my setup so far until today. I have been exclusively using ISO files but today I wanted to start using Blu Ray Folder structure with some rips to start saving space. I did 2 of them with ClownBD/AnyHDDVD but I cannot get it to play from media center. I am also using TMT3. I tried to make sure that the file extension is set to use TMT3 but when I looked at the Blu Ray folder structure, the movie file is an m2TS (maybe missing a letter here - i'm at work and dont recall the file extension correctly).

Anyways, media center config utility does not that file extension per say - just TS, ISO, Blu Rays and a few others.

Any ideas what I my be doing wrong?

THanks

I think for MyMovies you don't need points if you want to launch TMT to play your BluRays but will need points if you want to launch a player for y our mkvs other then the default player

I can play Blu-ray discs directly from MPC-HC, including bitstreaming of TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, and all of my rips are in MKV format, so is there any compelling reason to install TMT3? Is the video and audio quality any better?

If you wanted BluRay menus/BD Live you would need TMT3

That's it? The quality of the filters is no better? I think it is a big bonus that MPC-HC plays the movies directly without having to deal with previews, menus, extras, etc. That is one of the big advantages of ripping movies to HD in the first place.

any suggestions?