Transcoding VS Remuxing? MS where's the native support? Have your say!

Ever since I got in to Media Center DVD playback and now Blu-ray and MKV playback on extenders has really really frustrated me! In the fact that they don't support it!

I still can't believe in this day and age, that we are unable to natively play ripped DVD's on extenders. I was amazed MS even gave us native DIVX/XVID support in 7MC MCX on the XBOX 360. After 18 months of moaning about it I was happy to see they eventually did it and I'm sure other people were waiting a hell of a lot longer than I was.

It's not a technical limitation but must be political one with the big Hollywood content providers, but as a comsumer I don't care frankly. I've purchased my DVD and Blu-ray's discs, I should have the right to consume them in my home with my family anyway I choose and on any device.

What are the current options for DVD playback on extenders ? Transcoding where the VOB's are remuxed on the fly to MPG. Transcode 360 is a life saver no doubt but it's just not reliable enough for my liking. Transcode 360 can be used with MC, My Movies and Media Browser and gives it more scope over the newer Vaders's transcoder which only works with the Vista Media Center native DVD Library, I could never get it working on the native 7MC Movie Library and am not aware of anyone having done so ?

So transcoding in my mind is flakey at best and not 100% reliable. Then there is talk of this new native transcoding in 7MC. The ideal idea is that anything I can play in 7MC on the PC can be transcoded to the extenders natively. I have yet to have seen this in action. I'm not sure anyone really knows how and when or if this native Win7 transcoding occurs? What's the process that runs?

It certainly doesn't transcode my MKV's or DVD Vob's to my extenders so is it even there? And the newly added DIVX/XVID support on the XBOX 360 MCX seems native to the XBOX side to me via a dashboard update which re-appeared in the 7MC MCX the first time when trying to play DIVX/XVID on the 7MC MCX.

What are the other options then? The best I have found for DVD is remuxing the container to DVR-MS using Video Redo Plus for seamless DVD playback (Main Movie Only) on extenders with full FFWD capabilities. And TSMuxer to remux MKV's in to M2TS files which 7MC natively supports.

It's still all a mess it's still way too much hard work for the average guy in the street when will it ever end ???

So where's the AVI love?

Microsoft recently announced native H.264 support for Media Center and the XBOX 360 MCX. Well that was a no brainer as HD TV in many countries requires H.264 support.

So my question or half of it anyways still remains, when will we see native support in the XBOX 360 MCX for DIVX / XVID / AVI ?

Your guess is as good as mine but I now feel this won't be happening and I will be ditching my XBOX's in favour of Sony Playstation's for games and V2 extenders for MCX.

Samsung Media Live Extender

Samsung Electronics America Inc., the leader in the U.S. digital television market, lets consumers view PC-content on a Samsung HDTV with the retail launch of the company’s MediaLive adaptor. Samsung’s MediaLive delivers digital content (including HD content) in real-time from Windows Media Center on a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate operating systems to the big screen of a Samsung HDTV via a wireless or wired home network. From photos, music, feature films, home movies, and live and recorded TV programs, Samsung’s MediaLive is the ideal plug-and-play complement to most 2008-model Samsung HDTVs.

Full story here

Update:

Samsung Press Release

How To Set Up Your Samsung Digital Media Extender

Samsung TV Models with Anynet + / HDMI-CEC

Problems setting up an extender with XP SP3 ?

Possible issue running Xbox 360 PC setup on a Window XP SP3 system with Media Center 2005 installed.

Aaron Stebner from Microsoft outlines an issue with MCE 2005, XP SP3 and setting up extenders:

Recently, I have heard from a few customers who have had an issue installing the Xbox 360 PC setup package in order to configure their Xbox 360 as a Windows Media Center Extender. I want describe the issue, what is happening behind the scenes and how to work around it in case anyone else runs into it in the future.
Description of the issue
The customers I talked to had all previously upgraded to Windows XP SP3, and when they attempted to run Xbox 360 PC setup afterwards, they received an error message that looks like the following:
There is a problem with the installation of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Uninstall the update to Media Center Edition 2005 and then re-install the update from the Windows Update website. Then run Media Center Extender setup again.........................

The full blog post about this issue can be found here.

DVD Library on Extenders - How To

This is a very interesting development, a hack has been released that enables the DVD Library in VMC on the extenders. There was talk of just such a solution on the Green Button awhile ago now, I guess this is the result of those discussions.

This is a hack and your extender will still not natively play DVD vob's. This is a method that tricks the extender in to thinking a .vob is a .mpg file, with the use of symbolic links.
Also you will only get the main movie on the extender no menu's or extras.

DVD Library on Extenders - How To Guide

Here's the new discussion about it on TGB

I like what these guy's have done and it's a step in the right direction, but for me personally having already converted my DVD's to DVR-MS format as well, I think I'll stick with the My Movies add-in for use on the extenders.

Ripping DVD's for Vista Media Center and Extenders

This topic has been covered lots of times at TGB and there are various ways to achieve the ripping and streaming of standard definition DVD movies to Media Center and Extenders and to other secondary Media Center PC's.
Its a real shame there is no native support for this in Media Center, I can remember how disappointed I felt, when I discovered that the default DVD library in Vista Media Center was not extended to the version 2 extenders such as the XBOX 360 and the Linksys DMA2100 and DMA2200.

Support for such a feature may be coming in the next version of Media Center code named Fiji or so the rumor mills suggest. In the mean time the way I have achieved this is to rip my SD DVD's to my hard disk drive using my preferred tool Magic DVD ripper. If you are already using AnyDVD with Media Center, that will also do the job of getting those VOB files on to your hard disk.

Now you can rip just the main movie to save space or you could rip the entire disk including the menus and extras. I opted to rip everything. Once you have some of your DVD's ripped to the hard drive you can easlily get them in to Vista Media Center. To enable the default DVD Library in VMC you will need to make a small tweak in the registry. For instructions on how to do that see this MS KB article.

Now you need to tell VMC where your DVD VOB files are located? This is a common mistake to add a watch folder in to the wrong area of VMC and this is exactly what I did. When I first did this I went in to Tasks - Settings - Library Settings and added a watch folder to D:\Data\Movies\DVD but nothing happened and I could not see my newly ripped DVD's in the VMC DVD Library. What gives?

You actually don't add the watch folder in the main Library Settings of VMC. Instead you need to go in to the VMC DVD Library itself, right click and select from the menu add Movies and then add the location of your ripped DVD's. See this guide for more information and some screen shots.

Ok so now you have some of your DVD's showing up in the VMC DVD Library. On my main VMC PC these play great using the default MS MPEG-2 decoder and because I ripped the entire disk I have the menus and extra as well for the full DVD experience.

So what's next? Well depending on what other Vista Media Center systems and extenders you have in your house you can do a few things to extend this to other devices and areas of your home. For example in addition to our main VMC PC we also have a VMC laptop running Vista Ultimate. To have the same VMC DVD Library show up on that secondary media center laptop all I had to do was share out my DVD folder in Windows so it could be accessed from the laptop. Then in Media Center on the laptop go in to the DVD Library and add Movies again this time using a UNC path e.g. \\MCE01\DVD. MCE01 is the name of our main VMC PC. Excellent so now we can have access to the same DVD Library on the laptop say in the kitchen or in the garden and it streams really well over a 802.11g wireless network

Extenders are a totally different matter altogether and you cannot natively stream DVD VOB's. You have a few options here. What I did was to use an application called VideoReDo to convert the VOB's in to a DVR-MS file. A DVR-MS file is just a different container, so its a very quick process of quick streaming the files in to DVR-MS as there is no re-encoding. DVR-MS is the standard file used by VMC for recorded TV. Some other people simply rename the single .VOB file to .MPG for playback on the extenders.

Now it is not possible to have all the menus and extra's functionality on the extenders, so I found I had to re-rip my DVD's but this time only rip the main movie. Then in the VideoReDo application you just open the VOB, select the starting point and select the end point and mark the selection and then choose to output to DVR-MS 5 or 10 minutes later you have a lovely DVR-MS file of the main movie that can be played back on the extenders.

You could in addition rip the extra's separately if you wished and quick stream them in to additional DVR-MS files. I haven't really done this other than for things like the Star Wars extra bonus disks.

As we have already discussed the VMC DVD Library does not extend to the extenders UI. So you need some where in VMC to host the DVR-MS files for playback on extender. One obvious place would be the VMC Video Library, however that would mean having two different UI's for DVD playback on the main VMC PC and on the extender. My solution was to use the My Movies add-in on both. The great thing about using My Movies is not only do you get the same UI on the VMC PC and on the extender, it is also intelligent enough to know to play the VOB's if you are on the VMC PC and to play the DVR-MS file if you are on an extender so the whole thing is fairly transparent to the user. The obvious down side to this is having to have two copies of each movie and you need lots and lots of storage space on your disk drive(s).

But I am hoping that one day I can just delete all my DVR-MS movie files if and when DVD streaming is natively supported by Microsoft.