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As I mentioned in the last post, I’m running the Media Center (yes, that’s how they spell it) interface from Vista Ultimate to drive my HTPC. Out of the box Vista Media Center (VMC) is capable of playing DVDs and MPEG2 broadcast content - such as the output of a Hauppauge DVB-T or DVB-S TV card. What it can’t do is play the more esoteric formats such as DivX, XVid and hidef containers such as the Matroska (MKV) files.

In order to play these files in VMC I had to install a few extra codecs and applications:

Haali Media Splitter

This is the standard app for any system trying to play video stored in the Matroska container format. It “splits” the file, piping the video, audio and - if present - subtitles to separate codecs for further processing. It does not do any decoding itself, merely allows other decoding apparatus to see the streams. It also allows the system to see into the containers to create thumbnails - which makes things in VMC much prettier.

ffdshow tryout

This does nearly every other codec you can imagine. During installation on the mixer settings screen I turned the mixer off. After installation I ran the audio and video configurations to make a few more changes: AC3 and DTS audio were set to spdif: this allows ffdshow to direct the audio stream directly to the optical out for my A/V Receiver to process.

Also, in the Video Configuration I set x264 decoding to disabled, because instead of using ffdshow, I used:

CoreAVC

CoreAVC (which actually includes Haali as part of its setup) is a multi-core aware AVC video decoder. With a fast enough processor it is capable of decoding 1080p MKV files while ffdshow pushes DTS audio to my receiver. It’s not free - setting you back a measly 15$ - but is well worth the price. Rumour has it that ffdshow will soon be multi-core aware, if so it would mean you could do without CoreAVC. At the time of my build however, this seemed the best solution.

In the CoreCodec Settings, make sure that Explorer Integration is set to Yes - this enables thumbnailing.

In order for VMC to recognise .mkv files as video, I had to add these settings to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv]
@="CoreMedia.MKV"
"PerceivedType"="video"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.ts]
@="MatroskaVideo"
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Content Type"="video/x-matroska"

Save that as “mkv.reg” and double-click to add it to the registry.

With those applications installed and with those few changes made your system (assuming decent processor) will be able to play 1080p x264 mkv files, complete with 5.1 DTS audio. You may congratulate yourself with a cup of tea. Come back soon for why I’m using satellite TV cards rather than Freeview (and why doing so is a pain in the proverbial in the current version of VMC) also: the must have VMC plugins to manage your movie collection and TV episodes.