A few days ago I wrote a guide to setting up Windows 7 codecs, which is much harder than on Windows Vista. Some readers replied saying that there are several codec packs out there that do this, but in my experience they only get you part of the way there especially if you have a slower machines and can’t afford the bloat, and it’s also better to have a full understanding of what apps are doing what.
One of the messy steps in my guide was setting preferred codecs in W7MC, which involved manually changing system files. Luckily, one of the ffdshow developers CLSid has created a new tool that handles all of this automatically. The Preferred Directshow Filters Tool can change preferred codecs for Windows 7 Media Center in a few clicks.
- Currently supported formats:
- H.264
- MPEG-4 (Xvid/DivX/MP4V)
- MPEG-2
- VC-1
- Currently supported third party filters (32-bit):
- ffdshow
- MPCVideoDec
- CoreAVC H.264 decoder
- Xvid MPEG-4 decoder
- DivX H.264 decoder
- DivX MPEG-4 decoder
- DScaler5 MPEG-2 decoder
- Gabest MPEG-2 decoder
- Cyberlink H.264 decoder (PDVD 7/9)
- Cyberlink MPEG-2 decoder (PDVD 7/8/9)
- Cyberlink VC-1 decoder (patched with VC1Tweak: guid {394DFD1B-6F4C-4096-AA14-EF852B02595B})
- ArcSoft H.264 decoder
- ArcSoft MPEG-4 decoder
- ArcSoft MPEG-2 decoder
- ArcSoft VC-1 decoder (patched with VC1Tweak: guid {9DAD7B50-4432-4F48-AC60-B2B4E854454B})
- Currently supported third party filters (64-bit):
- ffdshow
- MPCVideoDec
- Xvid MPEG-4 decoder
- Gabest MPEG-2 decoder
- Works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7.
