Tommy Nation

By installing the Media Control Plugin for Vista Media Center by Damien Bain-Thouverez, you can finally play back video files with subtitles, especially files using the Matroska container format (MKV). Multiple subtitles support, multiple audio streams support, FFDShow settings tweaking, and much much more is enabled.

The plugin can even hook on to the remote control driver and enable access to customizeable special functions and shortcuts when using a Media Center compatible remote control. There’s even a newly added feature that enables Windows Live Messenger integration. I haven’t tested this one myself yet, though.

If this is just what you’ve been looking for, then head on over to the homepage and download it now! Be sure to read the requirements section carefully before you install it.

Thank you Damien for this great plugin! Please show your support by donating to him if you find it useful.

I daily enjoy the possibility to access the files on my other computers at home directly, without having to share the root of the harddisk using normal file sharing. I recently built a HTPC (Home Theatre PC), and as fate would have it, chose Vista for its fresh new Media Center possibilities. Problem? How to enable access to admin shares using a local administrator account remotely in Vista?

When you try to do this the same way you could in XP, you get prompted to log in, but get access denied. Apparently, for “security reasons” this option has been disabled. Thankfully, a small registry hack is all it takes to get around the issue:

1. Open regedit (<Windows> + R, type “regedit”).
2. Expand the tree to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ policies \ system.
3. Create a new key (Right click -> New -> choose “DWORD Value (32bit)”).
4. Name the key “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it the value of “1″.
5. Click OK.

If you’re so lucky to have an external hard disk drive that connects to your computer through USB / USB 2.0, then you can get increased performance from your hard disk in Windows Vista. This is because Vista treats your external drive differently than a FireWire (IEEE1394) or eSATA-connected drive, rather more like a USB pendrive. By switching off a feature called “Write Caching” might work swell for a thumdrive, it seriously hampers the performance of your external USB hard disk. Here’s how to disable write caching for your USB hard disk:

1. In Windows Vista, first click on “Start”, bringing up the Start menu.
2. Right-click “My computer” and select “Manage”.
3. On the left-hand menu, click “Device Manager”.
4. Locate your external hard disk drive in the list.
5. Right-click your disk and select “Properties”.
6. Click the “Policies”-pane and check “Optimize for performance” and “Enable advanced performance”.
7. Reboot your computer!

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Right click on the shortcut for Windows Media Player 11 and click on ’Properties’. In the ‘Target’ field, after the ” ends, type ‘/Task NowPlaying’ (without the single quotes).

Example: If the shortcut looks like ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Prefetch:1] change it to ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Task NowPlaying].

How to mark a partition as active using the Windows interface:

1. Open Computer Management (Local)

2. In the console tree, click Disk Management.

Where?
Computer Management (Local) > Storage > Disk Management

3. Right-click the primary partition you want to mark as active, and then click Mark Partition as Active.

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If you managed to go into Disk Management in Windows XP and somehow click “Mark Partition as Active” accidentally, this could render your computer unbootable. If you are so lucky that you haven’t rebooted yet, here is one possible solution to the problem: mark the partition as inactive using the DISKPART tool:

1.  Open up a command prompt and type DISKPART.
2. Type LIST DISK
3. Type SELECT DISK n (where n is the number of the old Win98 drive)
4. Type LIST PARTITION
5. Type SELECT PARTITION n (where n is the number of the active partition you wish to make inactive)
6. Type INACTIVE
7. Type EXIT to exit DISKPART
8. Type EXIT again to exit the command prompt
9. Reboot

If you have problems booting your computer or the above approach didn’t work for you, you could also try what Microsoft suggests on their help page entitled The computer does not start after you change the active partition by using the Disk Management tool - external link, opens in new window. For your convenience, the content of that page is reproduced below:

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