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[AVI]

Hi

Having received the email about how wonderful MC was now for video playback I decided to give it a try. This being based on it not being very good at all once.

I normally use MyMovies within MCE with Arcsoft TMT as the decoder. I therefore imported the movie library to MC and played some films. I noted the following;

1) My collection includes DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. MC is happy to play all three but for some reason instead of presenting cover art for an HD-DVD title it displays multiple 'covers', some of which are frames from the film and some of which are random bits of cover art for films not in my collection. This not only looks terrible but makes it impossible to select an HD-DVD title with any success.
2) When playing a Blu-Ray title via Arcsoft TMT3 with Hardware Acceleration enabled it is perfect. In MC the video has slight but visible stutter using the default settings. If Hardware Acceleration is enabled the picture just breaks up. Its unusable.
3) After choosing a Blu-Ray title it just plays. There are no commands its seems to setup the playback options for the disc. Using an MCE remote I cannot enter the menu. MC instead seems to have selected some version of the film that includes some kind of special feature that brings up comments and the like. Really annoying.

As an aside to this functionality, what would also be nice to 'fix' if I can call it that is the appearance of titles in the Library. As the box size for Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) is different to DVD, the scanned cover art is also different. This does not look great in the Library (or apps like JRemote). MyMovies add the blue (or maroon) case tops to the images for HD titles to standardise the dimensions so it looks better in the library. Cannot MC do this?

[CountryBumkin]

It sounds like you don't have the program fully setup. Are using Video Mode > RO Standard or RO HQ (High Quality)? Do you have VideoClock turned on?

Did you go to Standard View >Video >Files and check that the meta data is there?
Should look something like this (there are a lot of fields you can view on this screen - but file type,  media sub type, FPS, thumbnail, descrption, name (season, series, edisode if its a TV Show), are a few of the important/useful ones to check):

[mpg732]

I was doing the same thing you were doing.  WMC and Arcsoft TMT, and I can tell you I would not go back.  This is one program that does every thing I need it to do.  With that said you do have to do some configuration.  Like turn on hard Hardware Acceleration, this made a huge difference on video quality on both BlueRay and DVD.  I wonder if your PC is not fast enough.  What are the specs of your PC and graphic card?  Also what are you audio settings.   I found that can make a difference.

Cant help you per say with the HD DVD cover art, but have you tried manually getting the movie info and then selecting the cover art.  To do that all you have to do is go to your movie list, find the movie and right click on it a select "get movie info"  The other option is to use your own cover art.  IE Down load the cover art and insert it.

For the BlueRay, are you playing from disc or hard drive?  Are all Bluerays like this or are just some?

[AVI]

Thanks for the heads up. I will try the settings you suggest and let you know the results.

Re Hardware Acceleration, I would normally always use this as it leverage's the GPU and reduces CPU overhead but when applied the result was unwatchable. Maybe is combination with one of the other settings it will be different.

As to PC spec, as a system builder we have moved away from standalone graphics cards etc and use MB GPU's on the ITX sized systems. These do everything we need of video and work fine with TMT. My guess is MC is just not as developed and efficient as other decoders at the moment so puts greater demands on the hardware.

Re the cover art. MC is supposed to recognise the MyMovies xml files so why it treats HD-DVD differently to other types I don't know. Its not a major problem, just for existing titles. We build movie servers for clients and having to do everything manually is just not an option and if it becomes one it has to be simple. Its one of the things that makes MM very good. Having said this the MM xml files are now encrypted. I have yet to see what MC makes of these.

Thanks again. I will have another play and see what happens