How to import HD movies into Windows Media Center

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Playing high definition movies within Media Center is tricky, and becomes even trickier if you are an extender user. Even if you get it working, then you lose certain things like fast forward and rewind. Luckily Ben makes use of some available free tools for Media Center, DVRMS Toolbox (from our friend Babgvant) and Yammm (from Mikinho) to almost automate the entire process.

 

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This is a simple process that accepts various video files, analyzes the codecs in the container, converts the streams to MPEG-2 video with AC3 audio and wraps it all up into a dvr-ms file. We’re leveraging the Movie Library in Media Center to view and pull metadata, but we’re also using a utility to help it along. The utility is called Yet Another Media Meta Manager (Yammm) and it simply takes the file name and downloads the folder.jpg and dvdid.xml file needed by Media Center to make it download the rest of the metadata. If you use a different program like Media Browser to play the content, we created a slimmed down DVRMSToolBox profile that only does the conversion called Convert avi or mkv to DVR-MS.

 

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