The (hopefully) last major remaining problem I managed to solve last night.  I’ve been watching the 5th season of Lost (after getting it playing using Shark007′s Codec Pack).  These were 720p HD H264 mkvs and played fine.  However, another set of videos encoded with Xvid and refused to play in Media Center but would play in Media Player.

Media Center’s error was: Cannot Play Video: Windows Media Center cannot open the file.  Wow, such a descriptive error message.

I tried searching for logs to see if I could get more information about the error, but had no luck with this.

I tried all sorts of configuration utilities but nothing seemed to work.

I finally stumbled upon an article on the Hack Windows 7 Media Center site that talks about the Media Center Decoder Utility (MCDU).  This tool lets one select the default audio and video decoders.  When I ran it, there was apparently no default audio decoder selected.  I selected ‘Microsoft DTV-DVD’ as the default for for both audio and video.  After clicking ‘Set Defaults’ and restarting Media Center,

Note: I had previously followed another Hack7MC article that had me ‘Take Ownership’ of the file C:\Windows\system32\MP3DMOD.dll and append .bak to the file name.  I had to rename this file back before using MCDU.  Apparently MCDU is actually a nice GUI front end for renaming this file and setting some registry values that correspond to the defaults for the audio and video decoders.

So check out MCDU if you are having decoder problems, it might just fix your problems!

My last remaining issue is with audio, specifically with mute.  It works with my remote as expected initially, but after some unknown event, the mute button refuses to have any effect.  If you’ve managed to fix this, please let me know how!

mount error(12): Cannot allocate memory
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

After checking the Event Viewer System log, I found the following error:

Source: srv
Event ID: 2017
Level: Error
The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

Some research led me to find this Google Groups discussion about the problem and this Microsoft Technet article discussing the solution (look at the bottom of the page).  Apparently you need to tell Windows that you want to use the machine as a file server and that it should allocate resources accordingly.  Set the following registry key to ’1′:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache

and set the following registry key to ’3′:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size

After making these changes and restarting, I haven’t seen this issue arise again.  Fixed!

Update (2011/9/16): I had no idea this fix would end up being so popular when I wrote it up.  It is easily the most visited page on this site.  The original Technet article seems to be gone now, but a commenter has pointed me to a text file that contains the same content.  Here is the link: http://www.decuslib.com/decus/vmslt99a/nt/tips.txt

More detailed steps are as follows:

1. Install AC3Filter
2. Install the ‘Take Ownership’ registry hack
3. Take ownership of ‘C:\Windows\system32\MP3DMOD.dll’ (right click -> Take Ownership)
4. Rename ‘C:\Windows\system32\MP3DMOD.dll’ to ‘C:\Windows\system32\MP3DMOD.dll.bak’
5. Get the CLSID of AC3Filter using Radlight’s Filter Manager.
6. Set the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\MediaCenter\Decoder\PreferredMPEG2AudioDecoderCLSID’ to the CLSID from the previous step.

A restart may be required here.  After doing this, all audio for media center should be piped through AC3Filter.  Now one can adjust the settings in AC3Filter to adjust gain, surround settings, equalizer settings, etc.

I’m now able to control all my audio using the system volume rather than my stereo’s volume.