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Thursday 8 January 2009

New Movie Library in Media Center 7 so what can it play?

They say a picture speaks a thousand words so here's one of my pictures.

Full Screen View here

We have been playing around with the new native Movie Library in Media Center 7 that replaces the DVD Library in Vista. It's still a little buggy in places but I have to say it's a massive improvement on the original DVD Library. It looks the same really but the main thing for me is the ability to add in lots of different types of video files.


So far we have confirmed the following types on the PC not all will play on the extenders however:

.VOB (DVD)

.M2TS (Blu-ray)

.WTV (Recorded TV)

.DVR-MS (I needed KB961367 for playback on this build of 7000. Official beta might be ok without it)

.AVI (DVIX)

.WMV

.MOV

.MKV

.FLV (Flash)

.MPG

.MP4

Not too shabby a list at all, see the updated Video File types and containers table in PDF here.

For some types like MKV, MOV and Flash you need to install additional components as these are not natively supported

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks great! How does one learn how to organize the files for the library?

Unknown said...

Microsoft is still years behind the consumer demands. Not to support a common format like MKV is really bad. MKV is supported by most standalone media players today and if microsoft really want to make htpc to reach the common market they must support mkv and mkv to extenders. I am really dissapointed if mkv is not supported in WIN 7 media center.

Anonymous said...

Microsoft is still years behind the consumer demands as usual. Not to support a common format like MKV is really bad. MKV is supported by most standalone media players today and if microsoft really want to make htpc to reach the common market they must support mkv and mkv to extenders. I am really dissapointed if mkv is not supported in WIN 7 media center.

CW-KID said...

Thomas, I agree with you totally. Mr A take a look at this thread around pafe 14 or 15 I think: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/322045.aspx

Anonymous said...

I can confirm that, while MP4 HVC (.mp4 files - H.264) work from the Win 7 PC, they don't play on my XBOX 360 Extenders. Interestingly, they don't even show up in the video list on the extender.

Too bad. My very brief test of that format compared to .WMV was that the H.264 files were more sharp, even with comparable bitrates and dimensions.

Anonymous said...

Over the last couple of months I have rewired my house to allow me to move my Linksys extender to various tv locations and have it remain on a wired network for a more reliable experience. I have enjoyed using WMC and experimenting with different addins. One of my greatest pains is with the lack of native VOB playing on the extender - this looks to be the case with the new gen of windows as well??!!??