More on the bullshit Windows video experience
I’ve written before about the unreasonable difficulty associated with watching DVD-quality video on a Windows machine. Yesterday I finally figured out how to get the x64 version of Vista Media Center to play back HD video without the video lagging significantly behind the audio.
As I’ve noted before, video on Windows is hard because:
- Microsoft does not ship the codecs needed to play the relevant high-resolution video formats
- There is no standard source for such codecs. Multiple codec packs exist, while others install the codecs they need manually
- 64-bit editions of Vista run the 64-bit Vista Media Center, which can only use 64-bit codecs, but for some reason the world of codec developers has not caught up with the last five years of processor architecture advancements, and ships only 32-bit binaries
None of these problems are insurmountable, but if you’re just a regular user and you’re trying to set up a media center PC with which to play your video collection, it’s unlikely you’ll have a good time of it. It’s also hard to find answers to these questions because it seems everyone posting on TheGreenButton and related forums find a slightly different way to solve the problem. It also doesn’t help that Microsoft are shipping ‘updates’ to VMC that break it substantively.
So, here’s my secret handshake for HD playback in x64 VMC:
- Install the Vista Codec Package
- Install the Vista Codec x64 Components
- From the Start menu, go to VistaCodecPack, 64-bit Tools, Video Decoder Configuration. Check the check box to enable OSD (on-screen display). You can muck w/ the font settings to give the OSD an alpha channel value of 0 (meaning it’s fully transparent and you can’t see it). This seems absurd, but there really is a bug in the FFDshow stuff such that HD content, at least in MKV files, will playback with the video lagging the audio by several seconds, making the result unwatchable. For some reason, turning on the OSD, even if it’s alpha-channeled into invisibility, makes the problem go away.
- Uninstall the God-forsaken June 2008 Cumulative Update (KB950126). This was a delightful little best-ever update from Microsoft that made Vista Media Center super-awesome, but broke the following things:
- If video playback is paused or stopped, it will resume when the screensaver starts, when the Media Center window is minimized or resized, or in response to other random events
- When you stop playback, you may or may not get the menu with the ‘Done’, ‘Resume’, ‘Delete’ options.
- When you pause video and then resume, you may or may not resume where you left off, or playback may skip an hour ahead
And there you go. With this done, assuming your box has the juice for HD video, VMC will play HD content without the damnable lag. If you’re like me, you’re wondering how the learning-disabled monkeys that run the Vista Media Center QA department could possibly have missed the above bugs, so glaring that the Media Center forum sites are abuzz with wrath for this fucking update. I have no answer for you, except to note that Microsoft continues to not be serious about the Media Center convergence concept, despite BillG’s protestations to the contrary.
Tags: Migrated from Drupal, mkv, tech diary, video, vista media center, windows, x64