Posts Tagged ‘Vista Media Centre’

Plugins – Music Browser

Monday, November 24th, 2008

If you have a large collection of music (mine is over 40Gb) then you might find the standard Media Centre Music Library interface is not meeting your requirements. Issues arise especially if your MP3 tags are not correctly filled out, as this is what Media Centre uses to sort and categorise your music collection.

A common way to over come this is to store your music collection in folders by artist name or by genre. So you would end up with a file structure like:

A –> Anthrax
Ant Farm
Aphrodite

B –> Beastie Boys
Boogie Pimps

But Media Centre can not display your music collection by folders. Luckily there is a plug in that does: Music Browser. This little application enables you to browse through your music collection by folder. And the great thing is that it uses the album images the Media Centre download, so you can still see your favourite album cover.

The plugin is easy to install and it’s free! You can get it here.

If you have a large music collection this plugin is essential!!

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Re: Blu Ray

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Well it turns out I was not quite right – although upgrading the GPU to an 8400GS was a vast improvement, it is still not quite right. It seems that the CPU carries a bit of workload when paying Blu ray.The processor is running at between 60% and 100% during play back. And this is causing it to stutter slightly – enough to be annoying.

For the record the CPU is an Intel Pentium D 3066 MHz. So it seems that I DO need to upgrade my CPU

Which is a shame, becasue I really don’t want to. Although it does mean I can use the exisiting CPU in my yet-to-be-built home server….

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Blu Ray in VMC

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Now that the Blu Ray drive is installed, and I have gone out and bought a BR disc, I quickly discovered that my Nvidia 7 (7300GS) series graphics card was not able to handle blu ray playback. It worked but was very jittery – certainly unwatchable.

The blu ray drive comes with a piece of software that lets you know if your system is up to scratch – mine clearly wasn’t! The program said that my CPU and GPU were not able to handle playback. I suspected that the video card (GPU) ws not up to the job, but I would have thought my Celeron D processor would have been able to handle it.

So I took the cheap option and went out and bought an 8 series Nividia graphics card (8400GS), which I have just installed. And it works!! Amazing clarity on blu ray – even with my 768dpi screen (running at 600dpi).

So you need an 8 series or higher Nivida GPU and a Celeron D processor as a minimum to run Blu Ray. All we need now is for Windows Media Centre to play blu ray natively.

Hopefully this will be inplace for Windows 7….

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Re: Blu Ray install

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

I installed the Blu Ray drive last night – no problems. Just the usual, straight forward optical drive install. Vista even had a driver for it, although the bundled software did update to a newer version.

The drive installed was the highly rated LG Blu Ray / HD DVD combo – LG GGW-H20L. The drive comes with a blank RW Blu Ray disc, which is nice.

All I need now is a Blu Ray disc to play!

Unfortunately Vista does not natively support Blu Ray, but there are plugins that wil enable Blu Ray playback. This is the next thing to test. The test system has myMovies installed which tells me it can play Blu Ray discs. Which is why I need a blu ray movie – to test it!!

There is also a plug in called “Cyberlink PowerDVD Media Centre Plugin”. This plug in opens Cyberlink or Power DVD in full screen mode to play BR discs. It then closes the player and returns to VMC when done. Again, I need a Blu Ray disc to test.

I will have to get one tomorrow…

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Blu Ray in Vista Media Centre

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I have heard that there are issues with using Blu Ray with Media Centre. So I am going to give it a go. I should pick up the drive tomorrow. If not it may be early next week. Either way I am very curious to see how it goes.

Ever since Blu Ray won the war with HD DVD I have been itching to use it, but I have had no real need to install on my personal machine – I have no Blu Ray movies and my screen only runs at 768 resolution – not ideal for Blu Ray!

From my understanding the main issues are related to the codecs. We’ll see….

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Re: DVD not playing

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

It has taken me a few days (have a 6 week old daughter!) I have replaced the drive and guess what??

It works beautifully!! The drive have performed flawlessly since the install, so obviously it was a problem with the drive all along.

I think that the optical drive is out of balance which is:

1. Making it very noisy;

2. Causing the intermittent read errors.

Anyway, all sorted – thank goodness for a solid testing process!!

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Issue with DVD not playing

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Well… tested a system the other day and found that the DVD player was not working correctly. It appears to have an intermittent problem with playing DVD’s, both bought and burnt.

What happens is that the drive appears to seek for a master file or record, but can not find it. So it continually seeks the first track to locate the menu. Because it does not find it, the DVD drive is rendered inoperable and systems slows right down because it processes commands in between seeks.

Not sure what has caused this issue, however I think it is to do with the DVD drive itself. I have purchased another drive to install (most likely tomorrow) which I will test. Hopefully it is the drive…

To date I have tested:

1. DVD43 – uninstalled and reinstalled. Worked once, then stopped.

2. Updated DVD drive firm ware – worked once, then stopped.

3. Checked codecs. I know these are installed because the DVD drive has actually played a Region 4 DVD. It has also played a region free DVD.

So we’ll see how it all pans out tomorrow…

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