I had mentioned in my first post that I wanted to stream media to my PCs and consoles.  I had no success with the Media Sharing out of the box.  I am however able to find a lot of information on the internet of people who have had/are having the same problems.

Getting PCs to work was the first problem I solved.  Playing videos through Media Center was a matter of installing the right codecs.  I found the Combined Community Codec Pack was the choice that sounded best to me.  If you have Vista 64-bit you will also need to find “x64 Componets_v152.exe”  I also needed to install a reg hack to be able to see .mp4 files in Media Center.   I don’t recall where I got either of the last two updates, but you can get the contents of the .reg file by viewing the rest of this blog.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\MIME Types\video/mp4]
“UserApprovedOwning”=”yes”
“Extensions.SpaceSep”=”.mp4″
“Extensions.CommaSep”=”mp4,m4v,mp4v,”
“Extension.Key”=”.mp4″

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.mp4]
“Permissions”=dword:0000000f
“UserApprovedOwning”=”yes”
“Runtime”=dword:00000007
“PerceivedType”=”video”
“MediaType.Icon”=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,\
6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,\
00,77,00,6d,00,70,00,6c,00,6f,00,63,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,2c,00,2d,00,\
37,00,33,00,33,00,00,00
“MediaType.Description”=”MP4 File”
“Extension.Handler”=”mp4file”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\Descriptions]
“Others”=”Other file (*.mp4)”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\MUIDescriptions]
“Others”=”Other file”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\Types]
“Others”=”*.mp4″

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS\Extensions]
“mp4″=”video”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Media\Windows Media Player\Capabilities\FileAssociations]
“.mp4″=”mp4file”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Applications\wmplayer.exe\SupportedTypes]
“.mp4″=”"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.mp4]
“Content Type”=”video/mp4″
@=”mp4file”
“PerceivedType”=”video”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.mp4\ShellEx]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.mp4\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@=”{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}”

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.mp4]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.mp4\OpenWithProgids]
“mp4file”=hex(0):

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\MIME Types\video/mp4]
“UserApprovedOwning”=”yes”
“Extensions.SpaceSep”=”.mp4 .m4v .mp4v”
“Extensions.CommaSep”=”mp4,m4v,mp4v,”
“Extension.Key”=”.mp4″