So for the longest time, I have been trying to get Media Center to play .mp4 files, but after countless searching for solutions, I never really came across a working solution. There have been instructions on installing different codecs and adding/modifying registry entries.
Today I realized that after my format, I could no longer play Quicktime (*.mov) HD trailers in Media Center anymore. I’m pretty sure this has to do with the fact that I had reinstalled Windows Vista Ultimate recently and never bother to do something. I’m pretty sure Quicktime Alternative (now better known as QT Lite) has already been installed, but I reinstalled it just in case, but that didn’t seem to work. HD trailers played fine in WMP11 and Media Player Classic.
I knew it worked before, but I had no idea what I had changed. I started searching again and after a few tries, ended up on this thread: Quicktime movies in Vista MCE. The key thing to take away from that thread is:
Hi there
I’ve had the problem of after installing QT alternative, it will play .mov files quite happliy in mediaplayer 11, but doesn’t get picked up in Mediacentre (this is on vista, when i had MCE2005 it went fine)
Any obvious reason/fix?
Thanks
Just found the answer on greenbutton,.com:
You need to install Quicktime Alternative. This has a DirectShow Quicktime plug-in that will allow .movs to play within Media Player or even Media Centre. However, for the .mov files to even appear in MCE, you need to make the following registry edit:
In HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov create a REG_SZ called “PerceivedType” and name it “video”.
Worked a treat. (one has to ask why Olympus made there cameras to record video in a format used by about 5% of the population – if you are a PC fiddler like most of us then we’ll find a way around it, for the vast majority it’ll be no holiday videos on the MCE machine).
The trick is to create a new String Value, name it PerceivedType and give it a value of video. So I thought, what if I did this to the other file types I wanted. I went ahead and added this string value to .mp4, .ts, etc. and now they ALL show up and play in Media Center. Of course you have to get the codecs to get it playing in WMP before you can actually get it to play in Media Center.
Update:
Now if I can only figure out how to get non DVD files to show up in my DVD library.