Well, after searching high and low and everywhere in between, I found out how to successfully stream ripped DVD VOB files from my MCE 2005 PC to my extender. Read on to find out how!
I came accross this article below from http://windowsmediacenter.blogspot.com and it is very detailed in how to accomplish this task. It is more geared for Vista but you can impliment for MCE 2005 without having to worry about the user issue described below. I will add…. In MyMovies Collection Management, check, Configure/Media Center Interface/Extender Transcode/Let “Watch” button and MyMovies will use Transcode 360 as “engine” to play your files.
I just saw a great guide on setting up Transcode 360 with My Movies for MCE. Enables movie play back on the Media Center Extenders of DVD VOB’s, DivX and XVid etc.
It includes some of the pitfalls that took me a long time to work out, such as the Transcode 360 registry change that is required.
See the guide here on Adding Guest account to network movie folders and sharing themIf you will be accessing movies from an extender(Xbox 360), we need to alter permissions setting on the shared movie folders computer. The bottom line is ‘Guest’ account needs to be enabled on the other machine, and ‘Guest’ needs to have Read (Read and List) to the movie folders. On Vista Ulimate and Vista Enterprise Enabling go to Start>right click on Computer>choose Manage>expand Local Users and Groups>Highlight Users>in the right pane right click on Guest>choose Properties>on the General tab make sure that ‘Account is disabled’ is unchecked. Click Ok.
In Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium editions go to Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Accounts, and Turn on Guest Account.
To give Guests access to the movie folders go to Computer and browse to the root folder containing all of the movie folders. Right click the folder and choose Properties. Click the Security tab. Click the Continue button (if UAC is enabled). Click the Edit button. Click the Add button. In the ‘Enter the object names to select’ box type Guest. Click Ok. Click Ok again. Click Ok.
Share the movies folders, if not already, and everyone should have read.
Add the guest account the the movie folders. Give Guest account Read access.
I intend to come back and give instruction on the above two sentences.
If the above is not configured, when you go to Watch Stream on your extender, you will get a ‘Path not found ‘ error message.
To sum, enable Guest account, give guest account read to movie folders (do this by giving read to the parent folder (or drive) and the permissions will propagate down. Finally, share the folders so the UNC path matches the path you specified for the movies in My Movies.
Testing
Bring up your Xbox 360, connect to the Media Center, go to My Movies, pick a movie and choose ‘Watch Stream’. If you click Watch you will get an error. So use Watch Stream. You should see ‘Loading’ for a short period, and then you should get the spinning circle in the middle of the screen. The spinning circle may stop spinning for a short period before the movie starts. If the spinning circle stops and you wait, and wait…and no movie, then something is wrong. The xbox may be frozen at this point. I’ll get into some troubleshooting below.
Troubleshooting
The two versions of My Movies I have used TT with are 2.42 and 2.44.
It may be beneficial to disconnect from the Media Center on the Xbox 360 if the permissions changes were made while connect from the Xbox. I always do this when I make a change so I can’t really so if it is not necessary. From the extender, close media center. Then reopen media center on the extender.
Valuable information will come from the TT log file. These are located at C:\Users\Public\Transcode360\LogsIf you tried to watch a movie on your extender using Watch Stream in My Movies and it did not work, look at the log file with the most recent ‘Date modified’ value. This should be the log created when you tried to stream the movie.
The error message you get when you try to stream the movie is important. Depending on what happens, you may not get a message.
The event viewer on the Vista MCE machine will also give valuable information. Go to Start>right click on Computer>choose Manage>expand Event Viewer>expand Applications and Services Logs>Click on Transcode 360 Service>in the right pane events will be listed. Looks for events that are ‘Error’ and ‘Warning’.
Examples
The path [some path] was not found when trying to watch a network movie-> give ‘guest’ account access to the network folder
After doing the above try to watch the network movie and get ‘Transcode failed transcode was unable to transcode the file [some path].
-> this could be that the service is running with an account that does not have permission to the remote computer-> this could be the mencoder.exe file is not updated
If in the log file you see:
*ERR* Transcoding error:*ERR* This codecs.conf is too old and incompatible with this MPlayer release! at line 6
-> you can delete the codecs.conf file located in the C:\Program Files\Transcode360\Wrappers\MEncoderTranscoder\mplayer folder
If in the Event Viewer you have a message that includes ‘Cannot open file/device.
‘->it might be a permissions, network access, firewall type issue.
Make sure your movies are stored in a separate folder for each movie. Inside the movie folder there should be a Video_TS folder and within it the movie files (.ifo, .vob). Transcode 360 looks for the Video_TS folder and the movie files within. If the folder and file structure described above is not used, the movies will not work.
