Media Control Plugin for Windows Vista Media Center

I was first introduced to this plugin on a MS newsgroup: Media Control Plugin for Windows Vista Media Center. If you have bunch of downloaded or personally encoded videos (dvix, xvid, mkv, ogm, etc), you’ll notice that the FF/RW (fast forward and rewind) buttons on the MCE remote control don’t work. You can use skip forward >| and skip backward |< which is nice and jumps a couple minutes each push, but it’s really not feasible if you want to jump to somewhere deep into the video. If you hold it down, for some reason, it just jumps straight to the end after a few seconds.

Pushing the FF/RW buttons does pop up the seek bar or time line thingy (is there another word for this?), but doesn’t actually fast forward or rewind. A couple people brought this up in the newsgroup and asked for a solution, when someone posted this site: Media Control Plugin for Windows Vista Media Center. This was exactly what I was looking for. It’s features include:

• Switching embedded audio and subtitles streams while playing a video: works with AVI, OGM, MKV
• Switching between external subtitle files (.SRT, .SUB)
• Switching between FFDShow presets (audio & video)
• Setting and loading bookmarks inside a video with visualization of the pictures of the saved bookmarks
• Real fastforward (and rewind) exactly like in the TV module (with 3 different speeds)
• Switching and setting post-processing filters in FFDShow (video filters only)
• Separate application to assign keyboard/remote control shortcuts to the commands and the MCML pages of the plugin
• Full remote control support (6 buttons are mapped by default, but this can be changed)
• Default mapping (works in full screen while watching a video) :
  • Fast forward / rewind buttons
  • Blue button : loads the startup page of the plugin
  • Red button : switches audio stream
  • Green button : switches subtitle stream
  • Yellow button : switches subtitle file

I had even questioned the newsgroup on how to load subtitles from (.sub or .srt) awhile back and never really got an answer.

This is what you’ll need to install:
FFDShow rev. 935 or higher
Haali Matroska Splitter
Media Control

It notes that you’ll need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package, but my Vista Ultimate machine appears to either have it already or not need it. I could’ve installed it with one of the many software I installed on the machine, but I didn’t really do much, so I doubt I had installed it without my knowledge. It could’ve came down as an Windows Update.

Anyway, do note that the revision of FFDShow matters. I initially had rev. 610 (the latest stable version available) and was wondering why the heck after installing and configuring exactly as specified, that the FF/RW buttons still didn’t work. Turns out it was indeed the version of FFDShow that I had installed that was the culprit.

After you install the software, the somewhat part that you have to pay attention to is the video and audio decoder configuration. Please follow these instructions exactly. He’s provided a screenshot for each change you need to make/confirm.

After this, my MKV files were being detected as media files in MCE, subtitles were loading and overlayed on top of my videos, and best of all, my FF/RW buttons are now working!

Enjoy!