Media Center 2005 on VPC

[altitude2k]

I think this is the appropriate forum for this question...

I have installed Windows Media Center 2005 on Virtual PC and it is running fine apart from the fact that I am unable to play videos in Media Center. When I start up Media Center it tells me "Your video card or drivers are not compatible with Media Center" but it loads anyway. When I go to play a video it says "Video error: Files needed to display video are not installed or not working correctly. Please restart Media Center and/or restart the computer". Needless to say I have executed both of those requests to no avail. I find this strange seeing as it is still able to generate thumbnail previews of all the files in Media Center. I have the most up to date K-Lite codec pack installed so there should be no problems there. I know that VPC emulates an S3 Trio display adapter, so I'm wondering could this be the problem? And if so is it possible to get around it?

[TheAnimus]

i might be wrong, but i didn't think you could run Media Center under VPC because its not direct X9.

[Woodchuck2000]

The emulated graphics card in VPC doesn't provide any kind of hardware acceleration - I was under the impression that Media Centre requires basic hardware acceleration to play certain video types?

This said, with the overhead of emulating a second PC and doing all the graphics in software, the chances of playing a video smoothly inside VPC are roughly nil. Just out of interest, why install Windows MCE on a VPC?

[Tak]

You're far better off installing it as a second OS rather than emulating it.

[altitude2k]

A friend of mine installed it and had no end of bother with it - niggly little problems, and basically I wanted to install it without the issue of it being the OS that everything was relying on. Then again it was probably him just being stupid, so I may just read reviews, do a format and give it a go.

My main reason for wanting Media Center is actually in preperation for the Xbox 360 to allow me to stream media from my PC accross the network. Music and images can be done without MCE but for video it is a requirement. I tried it with VMware now which is a lot better, but I still have the video issue (apparently this IS because it's not able to emulate DirectX fully). At least now it gives my guest OS proper access to the network which would allow it to communicate with the Xbox. In this case I'm wondering whether Windows MCE would do any of the decoding at all, or whether it would all be left down to the Xbox, which I would imagine would be the case, otherwise the Xbox would be just a glorified monitor. This then brings up the issue of codecs and whether there will be divX and Xvid on the 360...

Basically I'm off Uni for the Summer and I'm looking for stuff to do