Decided to get MCE set up to play back music and videos.
Most of my videos are converted to MP4 to work with my ipod. Luckily I’ve encountered the problem before that WMP doesn’t play MP4 without the necessary codes.
I installed the 3ivx decoder and voila I could play the MP4s in WMP. I fired up MCE and browsed to “My Videos”. None of the videos showed up. A lengthy search on the Internet and I figure out that I need to make a change to the registry. This is the registry change to get MCE to show and play MP4 files (provided you’ve installed an appropriate decoder ofcourse)
Here is a quote from the AVS Forusm FAQ
[b]Q. How to play .mov files in MCE2005?
If you have QuickTime installed, you will need to unistall it.
Download and install Quicktime Alternative v1.42 /
- Untick install media player classic (you are already using WMP10)
- Associate .mov with windows media player
Edit the registry by adding in KEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov\
the a new string value “PerceivedType”, type REG_SZ; remember to set its value to video.
I obviously just replaced .mov with .mp4 and it worked. Ofcourse you can also try the Quicktime alternative referred to above.
Next I imported all my music files, just to realise that I’ve got some work to do on the music. All my music is tagged in iTunes with ratings and I use smartlists extensively to generate a “mix” playlist based on play counts, date played, songs skipped, year of the songs, etc.
Unfortunately I can’t replace iTunes with WMP because I have to sync my iPod with iTunes due to these smart playlists that I use.
I’ll post about how I solved this problem….. once I’ve solved it!
