There was quite an uproar a few weeks ago when ffdshow developers started to expose the fact that
3rd party codec support was changing and Windows 7 and while many were quick to jump to conclusions and write about the big bad corporation, we had a feeling some wires were just disconnected somewhere. Regardless, the good news is that 3rd party codecs are still supported in Windows 7, but if H.264 is supported natively then using a something like ffdshow instead is no longer a trivial matter -- and in our opinion not a bad thing considering the nightmares this has caused in Vista. Now forcing a 3rd party codec to play natively supported codecs isn't going to be easy, but it is possible. The up and coming Hack7MC.com has a pretty good explanation of just how to get it done. So if you're brave and just can't stand decoding H.264 with MS's included codec, then click on through and give it a try.
posted Apr 9th 2009 12:29PM
In all honesty, I run my laptop, a Core 2 T7200 with GMA950 and 2GB RAM, on Windows 7. I am not able to smoothly play .ts (H.264) files recorded from a Hauppauge HD-PVR in Media Player. They play beautifully in PowerDVD 9 Ultra. Therefore, I must assume that either the codec isn't optimized, or WMP isn't optimized.
You are probably just using an old build of Win7.
My Latitude with 3 GBs, a C2D U9400 and an Intel Integrated 4500 MHD GFX card plays a 30 GB BluRay perfectly in WMP and MPC
I'm not sure why I said in all honesty...
I agree, playing 1080p content with the included MS codec is like chewing on sandpaper. Even non-DXVA FFDShow does a much smoother job of playback. I hope they put some real effort into it before release as the majority of users out there will be using it by default.
... because we don't trust you.
You're probably just using an old Build of Win7. On 7068 a 30 GB BluRay is playing perfectly on my Latitude laptop with 3 GB of RAM, a C2D U9400, and an integrated intel 4500 MHD GFX card.
This article totally misses the point of the referral post! _ANYONE_ can add directshow filters (CoreAVC, FFDshow, DivX, etc.) to Windows 7... that's not the issue!! The issue as discussed at both the Doom9 and CoreCodec forums is that you cannot add filters to Microsoft's Media Foundation Graph as it is locked down.
This breaks Windows Media Foundation's h.264 playback forcing it to revert to a thrid party directshow codec.