I’m a big user of Windows 7 Media Center, and I have 3 machines now dedicated to running Windows 7 Media Center that support playing h.264, mkv and flac files. They are not high-powered machines; one’s an old laptop and the others are running old dual-core AMD processors.
Getting all my files and codecs setup and playing nicely in Windows 7 was a bit harder than with Windows Vista, but now all of my machines are now happy playing 1080p content as well as outputting the digital audio correctly via SPDIF and coaxial.
If you’re getting choppy video playback thanks to the (poor) Microsoft DTV-DVD decoder, then by following the steps below you will be able to avoid the hours I spent trying to get everything working. The alternative is to install a Windows 7 Codec pack, but most of these contain a lot of bloat that you really don’t need.
Stage I – Uninstall Old Codecs
If you’re starting from a fresh Windows 7 installation, then there’s nothing to do here. If you’ve tried installing a few codecs before following this guide then goo into control panel/add&remove programs and uninstall all your old codecs.
Stage II – Install FFDShow
FFDShow is a free codec for decoding/encoding just about every video format out there. I use it for everything apart from h.264 and mkv, for which I use CoreAVC. CoreAVC is the fastest H.264/AVC codec and is the best way for low-powered machines to play these files. For H.264 and mkv files there is no difference in quality, and at $14.95 it’s good value.
32 bit Windows 7 users:
- Download the latest latest version of ffdshow tryouts. During installation choose the following options:
- Untick ‘H.264‘ in the video codecs section if you have purchased CoreAVC
- Tick ‘MPEG2‘
- If you have your PC audio connected to your speakers or amp via SPDIF or coaxial then scroll down to the audio section and check enable AC3 and DTS passthrough
- Once finished, go into the fdshow video decoder configuration window and go to MPEG2 in Codecs. Make sure libavcodec is enabled and that ‘DVD decoding’ is checked
64 bit Windows 7 users:
- In addition to the 32bit steps above, you also have to install the 64bit version of ffdshow.
- During installation follow the other steps as above, but don’t untick ‘H.264′ in the video codecs section as CoreAVC doesn’t currently support 64bit media players (e.g. W7MC) but this is coming soon
Stage III – MKV and H.264 files
My recommedation here is to install CoreAVC (32bit only though)
32 bit Windows 7 users:
- Option 1: Install CoreAVC & Haali Media Splitter (done automatically) to to add MKV/H.264 support
- Option 2: If you didn’t untick H.264 support for Ffdshow then just install Haali Media Splitter
64 bit Windows 7 users:
- Follow your chosen 32bit Stage III option above
- Also, install Gabest’s Matroska X64 Splitter (Haali Media Splitter doesn’t support 64 bit codecs). Extract the files to the root of your C: drive and right-click ‘gabest_splitter_enable‘ and choose run as an administrator. You will get two confirmations and the process will be over. Do not delete the files after finishing! To remove just repeat, but click on ‘gabest_splitter_remove‘.
