I have been wanting to watch my videos that I have on my hard drive on my TV for a looooong time, but never seemed to have the right equipment that actually worked. Well yesterday a friend finally hooked me up with the right equipment and I have been playing with Vista Media Center since then.
First off, Vista Media Center rocks. I am loving it. I used to have to get up every so often and switch videos on my computer to watch from my chair or bed, not to mention mess with rotating the flat panel monitor. Well, now with media center and the IR Remote that is hooked up to the computer I basically have a TiVo like system going, minus recording tv.
Now along the way I ran into a problem, was user error. If you hit the power button on the IR remote it would send the computer to sleep mode. Not to big of a problem except the setting for windows was to prompt the user for a password upon resume. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem for I couldn’t seem to login or even get anything to display on the TV or my computer once I hit the power button on the remote again. So, I did the one last thing I could think of. Hard turn off of the computer.
That is when the problems started. Once I got it back up apparently some db got corrupted that no longer let me view the videos. So after reading for a few hours on the internets I came across the solution, and with a bit of guessing, to just delete the db’s. Only problem is I didn’t know where they were located as no where explicitly said where. After some searching I found out 2 things that are kind of important.
- Media Center information and stuffs are stored in “Microsoft\ehome” folder
- The media library database is stored in the “Microsoft\Media Player” folder
You can find the main stuff for Media Center at “C:\Windows\ehome”. That is where the executable and other things are located. Other stuffs are in “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ehome” that will be important for other things besides this problem. Just letting you know file locations.
What is the most interesting though is that the media center library is stored at “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player”. I was amazed because I figured they would store that info in the ehome folder.
Anyway, the problem specifically that I had was when I would go to the videos area of the menu in Media Center it would try to display all the folders, but wouldn’t. I could actually get it to do anything. Once I decided to delete the database information it reset everything back and I could finally add files through the monitoring folders of settings. Well once I did that it still didn’t work properly as the videos would only display in the “Date Captured” view.
So what was my solution?
- Delete the database files at “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player”
- Unmonitor all video locations
- Install 3rd party MCE application called Video Browser
That is it. Now I just use video browser app that I installed into Media Center as it works a lot better, but a bit different.
Install and Use Video Browser
Installing Video Browser is super simple. Just visit the site “http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/” download the installer and install it. After that go to the Pictures+Video section of your Media Center menu and you should see a tab to the left called Video Browser.
Now the most important part to not is. VB only monitors your “C:\Users\
I suggest giving the Media Center stuff a try in vista it is a lot of fun. So much fun in fact if I am not careful I might make an app for it.
