problems playing WMV HD movies (1 Viewer)

[nst6563]

I picked up Terminator 2 Extreme Edition at wal-mart last night for a whopping $7. I figured it'd be a good deal to show off the 1080p goodness of my new Mits 1080p set (b/c I have the HTPC running via HDMI2 @ 1080p).

I copied the WMV files to the HTPC's hdd, and can play them fine with WMP 10. It grabbed the license for me and then immediately started playing butter smooth and crystal clear. So I try to load it up in MediaPortal and it won't even load the video. No errors are displayed, but I haven't checked the logs yet, and can post them when I get home.

I was hoping someone has tried the same with the same or different WMV HD movie and had an answer.

btw...the extreme edition came with 2 discs. 1 that was re-mastered from a 1080p source but it's a standard DVD, the other disc has the WMV files and are true 1080p.


Also...on a side note...has anyone gotten 5.1 sound to work from a WMV HD file over SPDIF? I can get it to work over analog out just fine...but it just sends PCM over the SPDIF. DVD's pass 5.1 over SPDIF just fine. (this is in Mediaportal)

thanks (...I'm done rambling now)

 

[Brijn]

Hi,

You will not get 5.1 over SPDIF since the WMV-HD audio is WMA. Your receiver probably doesn't support that

Bas

 

[nst6563]

simple enough answer :wink:

any idea on the other issue though? As far as not playing the WMV files from the DVD?

 

[Brijn]

The logfiles might give some indication of what is wrong.. I'm not an expert at all, so hopefully somebody else will know what is wrong..

I'm interested in the topic because I want to order some WMV-HD content from Amazon

Bas

 

[Molokoids]

It's just DRM shit. Certain DRM WMW files are not playable through Media Portal. The last one I saw was the Batman Trailer, it's been removed now I think.

I know that some DRM files play fine in Mediaportal, but it surely depends on the kind of license they carry.

Look at Zoom Player, you need the pro version for playing WMV-HD disc so there must be some kind of proprietary implementation that deals with DRM.

 

[phil-t]

It must be the DRM, I've played numerous WMV-HD's in mediaportal without issue..

On the 5.1 sound front, this is a problem with WMV-HD's, they carry mutliple analogue streams encoded in WMA Professional, as mentioned you need something (software or hardware) to encode these discreet audio channels into an ac-3 stream to output to your receiver..

I've managed to get ffdshow's audio decoder to realtime encode these into an ac-3 stream from zoomplayer, but I can't get mediaportal's built in video player to use the ffdshow audio decoder in the same way..

In the end, I've just ordered a really cheap soundcard that has hardware ac-3 (Dolby Digital) encoding, in europe all we can get is the Terratec Aureon 7.1 pci, but in the US there is the HiTec X-Mystique 7.1 card.. both use the same chipset to do the work, but it does mean much more compatibiliy and less CPU overhead then a software decoder..