Media Center Setup!

So I finally set up a Home Theatre PC. Probably will re-build it from scratch now that I know what I'm doing, but I don't have the redo the time consuming part (ripping movies from DVD and transcoding them to H.264 (MPEG4).

So...if you want the fun and joy I've had you'll want:

• A TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge is a common one)
• Vista Premium Home or Ultimate
• Lots of free time to insert DVDs
• A DVD ripper (I use DVDFab, lots of people prefer AnyDVD, DVDDecrypter is free but does not support new formats)
• Assorted cables etc to plug everything in - most video cards have an adapter that will let you do S-Video out. My Geforce 7800 GT does
• TV Pack 2008 (Note this might not be legal, I doubt MS cares but it's OEM only
• Latest CCCP Codec pack (yes, I know you're too cool for Codec Packs, so am I. Get it, alternatively the latests FFDshow tryouts will work)
• Handbrake or Ripbot (Ripbot is probably better since you can update your H.264 encoder with out waiting for a new version of Ripbot, but it takes frigging forever to open your VOB files
• Understanding of what things are (i.e. VOBs are simply mpeg2 encoded video and an AAC audio stream, you'll have to demux them (break them into video and audio seperately) then put them back together (the two utilities listed above do  this for you)
• A MCE compadible remote
• http://www.mediabrowser.tv/ (a godly plugin for VMC)
  
• Lots of hard drive space (even in h.264 format a single movie takes about 2 gig of space).

Some tweaks:

LIVE TV Quality Trouble:
1)
Change BitRate:
First of all check the key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\DVR] and find the KEY DefAvgBitRate
Change it to somewhere between: 20000000 and 90000000
Select DECIMAL VALUE when changing.

DISABLE YOUR DIGITAL AUDIO IF THAT"S NOT WHAT YOU ARE USING - it will cause stuttering.

Download this registry patch and apply it:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~rock2002/Blog/v7-WMP11-MKV-MKA.reg

Tada, you're done!