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[beanernsd]

Can MC14 play commercial DVD's?  I bought MC12 18 months ago and it looked fantastic, its a great program. But after I bought MC12 and followed and downloaded updates into MC13 it just got worse. Every time I downloaded a newer revision it quit playing many commercial DVD's. Some wouldn't play at all, some would pop up in 2nd and 3rd windows, some had no sound. It got so bad that I had to remove all the updated versions and install the original program. It still has problems with some DVD's.

So, my question is, does MC14 play commercial DVD's without all the crazy stuff like, the video popping up in a different window, the sound not working or just having it refuse to play a commercial DVD at all? Is it worth the upgrade price? Oh, another question about a really annoying thing. Does it still leave 10,000 dead thumbnails with big yellow flags when you make the fateful mistake of putting a memory card in with a bunch of pictures. Then you have to delete all of them.

JB

[park]

Media Center relies on other programs' filters to play back all video types including DVDs. That means that if you have some DVD software or a codec pack (CCCP is recommended) that will play DVDs in other software, then you will also be able to play them back in MC.

In MC14 you can see a list of all the file types for video in the playback options and set whether MC should automatically choose which filters to use, or you can choose them yourself. The same for DVDs.

Re: your dead thumbnail issue. Simply turn off "automatically import files when played" in the import options and then only files that you explicitly import will show up in the library. This might already be turned off by default in MC14.

[Mr ChriZ]

I play DVD's with MC at least twice a week.  It's a pain/overly complicated to get the codecs right, but there's expertise here that will help you resolve any issues you get.  Once you get it working, it's pretty good!

I think I may have a go at writing a simple wiki to get people started on this, which doesn't require you to have a doctorate in understanding codec filters and the Directshow side of Windows...  The CCCP/FFDshow route tends to leave you unable to pause and rewind properly.  So I've started using Dscaler as recommended by others here.  Maybe then others can chip into it.

[JimH]

Media Center relies on other programs' filters to play back all video types including DVDs.

Not all.  Many would be more accurate.  MC has its own video codec, which we use for TV.  MC plays all WMV natively.  MC can use the playback engines of Quicktime, Real, and Microsoft. MC can use other programs to play a video type.

The wiki (link above) has an article on DVD Playback.