MKV/OGM/MP4 Support in Vista 2.0: Visual Edition
Posted by Jaymz, October 17th, 2006 in Anime, Software, Tech, WindowsSo a few days ago, I promised to update my guide on how to get your favorite non-Microsoft endorsed formats up and running under Windows Vista RC1, RC2, and possibly the RTM build when that eventually hits. This time around, I decided to make it a little more fool proof, by adding pretty pictures detailing the process one must go through to get your obscure formats running in Windows Media Player, Media Center, and the optimal configuration with Media Player Classic.
So, without further ado, here’s how I got the son of a bitch to work:
- First, download the latest CCCP. If you have downloaded or installed any other type of codec pack, then uninstall it. If you’ve installed Nero 6, uninstall it. This guide ASSUMES a clean install of Vista, so if you experience any problems and had some other type of codec pack installed, then :pt: and try this guide again.
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Find the downloaded CCCP installer, and before running it, right click on the installer, select Properties, go under the Compatibility tab, and ensure that Compatibility mode is enabled, and set to Windows XP (Service Pack 2).
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On this screen, be sure to untick Windows Media 9 VCM. I don’t think installing it will do anything bad, but WMP 11 already has this installed, so there’s no need for it either. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Zoom Player myself, but that’s completely up to you. Feel free to excercise your right in choosing a media player that sucks. :v:
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Under this screen, I usually set the FFDShow Audio Settings to No Change, as I have a 5.1 speaker setup, but prefer to keep 2 channel stuff as 2 channel. Under this setting, FFDShow Audio will play back audio in whatever channel format it comes with initially. If you only have 2 speakers or headphones, feel free to keep it at the default.
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For now, it’s best to keep these set to “No Change”. I’m not sure these settings will actually work, and my registry files will change these settings back in any case.
Now, if everything went according to plan, you now have the CCCP installed on your system. Now it’s time to do some configuring.
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First, go to the Start Menu and select All Programs.
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Find the Combined Community Codec Pack folder, and select Media Splitter Settings.
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Select the Option tab and expand Compatibility. Select Autoload VSFilter and set this to Yes.
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Now head down and expand Languages. Select Audio language priority and enter jpn under Value. This tells Media Splitter that Japanese is the default audio language. Keep in mind that this seems to only work correctly under Media Player Classic, and not Windows Media Player, or Media Center.
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Go down to Subtitle language priority and enter eng under Value. This tells Media Splitter that English is the default subtitle language.
This should be all you need for the Media Splitter settings. Now, it’s time to ensure Media Player Classic plays nice under Aero, displays subtitles correctly, and performs as best it can.
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Go back to the Start Menu, and find the CCCP folder.
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Start Media Player Classic. Select View from the Menu bar, and go down to Options. Alternatively, you can also hit O on your keyboard to bring up the same screen.
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Under Playback, select Output. Ensure that your output settings match the same ones as above - Directshow video is set to VMR9 (renderless), RealMedia Video and QuickTime Video is set to DirectX 9, and under “VMR7/9 (renderless)” & “DirectX 7/9″ settings, that Use texture surfaces and render video in 3D is enabled, Resizer is at least set to Bilinear, and VMR9 mixer mode is also enabled.
Just a bit of explanation about the above. I’m going to assume you’re running in Aero mode with a half decent DirectX 9 video card, that’s at least as good as the Intel 950 accellerator found on the i945GM chipset (which ain’t so good, guys). Just for further reiteration: THESE MPC SETTINGS DO NOT IMPROVE PERFORMANCE. THEY FORCE DIRECTSHOW TO DIRECTLY USE YOUR VIDEO CARD WHICH MAY, IN FACT, BE A PERFORMANCE DETRIMENT IF YOUR VIDEO CARD SUCKS ASS.
I have zero problems running these settings on my notebook with crappy Intel onboard graphics, in addition to Aero running, so these should work fine for you as well. If they don’t perform well at all, then I’d seriously consider upgrading your rig if you want to run Vista on it next year. If you know your video card sucks, then forget the MPC portion of this guide for now. Now, back to the instructions..
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The Internal Filters page should already be configured to look somewhat like this. This works pretty well for me, so I highly recommend sticking with this setup. If you have any kind of hassles, try to set things back to what the above image looks like.
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Now, for the subtitle fixups. Go down to External Filters, and select Add Filter… - then find DirectVobSub (auto loading version) in the list of filters (as seen below) and click OK. Now, select DirectVobSub (auto loading version) in your list of External Filters (as seen above) and set it to Block. This stops the doubling up of subtitles in MPC (and before people start bitching about whether MPC or VobSub’s subtitling is better, they’re both based off the same code and support the exact same subtitle formats).
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Now, the final touch is to go down to Subtitles, and find Maximum texture resolution under Texture Settings, and set this to Desktop. See my explanation about VMR9 stuff above if your system can’t handle this setting. If my el cheapo Dell notebook can do this, and you expect your system to run Aero under Vista in 2007, then your system should be able to handle this too.
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Now that you’ve done all the above, run Windows Media Player 11 at least once. Even if it’s just opening it, going through the setup process, and closing it down. It has to be executed once, or things just don’t work. Don’t try to open any of your bizarre formats yet. Just run WMP11 once, go through the setup screens, and shut it back down again.
Now.. that should be everything. The final touch is to download my new and improved registry files for all your bizarre format needs. These work under RC1, that build right after RC1, and RC2. I even tested these on the 64-bit version of RC2, and had to add a couple of additional things to make them work - that is, with the 32-bit version of WMP11. Christ only knows if they work with the 64-bit version.
So without further ado, install the following and rejoice:
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mkvfile.reg - For MKV and MKA files. These also allow for thumbnail view in Windows Explorer and Media Center, as should all the other formats below.
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mp4file.reg - For MP4 files. Be sure to keep a copy of this around if you install iTunes/QuickTime 7. Regardless of what you set your file associations to, QuickTime will screw up MP4 file associations unless you ensure QuickTime stops trying to steal it back, and rerun this registry key afterwards.
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oggfile.reg - For OGG and OGM files.
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tsfile.reg - For Transport Stream files (typically MPEG2/Dolby AC3 files in Xbox Hueg resolutions).
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VistaREG.zip - Zipped up archive of all of the above.
Now, as I explained before - these set the default player to Windows Media Player 11, for compatibility’s sake. You’ll have to change these to Media Player Classic (or your own sucky DirectShow based media player of choice) from either the Default Programs section of the Control Panel, or changing file associations with the Open With… menu in any Explorer window. Why? Because it doesn’t work from within Media Player Classic, that’s why. Not even in Admin mode.
If you’ve followed all of my instructions to the letter, and haven’t got any other kind of codec or video app installed (Nero, DVD playing software, etc, etc), then everything should have worked and you should now be able to play your tentacle rape MKV’s under Media Center, have thumbnails in your Explorer window without things crashing, and Media Player Classic should be all kinds of awesome, especially with softsubs. Enjoy!
53 Responses to “MKV/OGM/MP4 Support in Vista 2.0: Visual Edition”
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Hello and welcome to Respect Sakura, yet another shitty blog under the premise of being an animu blog, when it's really just about Jaymz's tech leanings, spending habits and crack-inspired ramblings on topics noone cares about. Oh, and that other guy posts stuff sometimes, too.
Please be warned that this site may contain strong language, adult themes, and sexual discussion about characters that may appear underage but are really over 18, and anything that may look or sound illegal really isn't, you just imagined it because your mind is sick and twisted, and it ain't my fault so don't you dare blame that shit on me son.




You know you can also if you want add full screen antialiasing to your video if you use the whole render your video using your video card menthod as explained here. Though doing so requires at least a geforce 6800 ultra or better. I’ll go into the method if anyone is interested.
So far so good. I do get an error when it tries to get thumbnails for most OGM files (80004002). I’ve had one MKV file give an error of “Invalid first byte of EBMIL ID: 00″, but that one I get every time I select it, not just when explorer tries to get a thumbnail and is probably due to the fileitself. But I think the OGM error is very annoying when you navigate to a folder where there are numerous files and you have to click OK for each one before you can interact with the window. Out of 26 eps of BlueGender, 2 actually give a thumbnail, the rest gife the “Error: can’t open file: 80004002″ error.
I also get a couple of MKV files that just show black screens for their thumbnails. I’m guessing that’s because it’s pulling the thumbnail from the first frame of the video and not a few minutes into it. Though, this could be a reminant of my previous attempt using your first tutorial. Know any way to fix this?
I’m still looking into my 80004002 problem… ;-)
Looks like a 80040154 error comes up when I acually try to play the video in WMP, but MPC plays it fine. Any thoughts? Oh and I found out the error definitions.
80004002 - No such interface supported
80040154 - Class not registered
As far as I can tell, the black screen thing is just the thumbnail renderer getting the first frame of animation. I have that same problem as well, and don’t have a way around it. Haali’s Media Splitter has an option to offset the frame by a number of milliseconds, but it doesn’t appear to work under Vista.
In regards to the OGM files screwing up, I haven’t had any problem with OGM’s myself, so it could be CRC issues or something else causing them to act screwy. I’d suggest Googling for MKVmerge and using that to dump the OGM contents into an MKV file instead, to see if that makes any difference.
my MKVs have always had pretty nasty load times compared to avis. The hard drive grinds for 10 seconds before the file opens. Now, the same thing happens when I just click on the file because the thumbnails have to load.
That ain’t normal. Mind you, I have some pretty powerful hardware that I play around with, but even with my old Athlon 64 3000 and single core 3GHz Pentium 4, I never experienced that kind of load issue - even with H.264 MKV’s. I’d like to know what kind of hardware you’re playing this stuff back on - and most importantly, what kind of hard drive you possess, and just how fragmented that sucker is.
In any case, you can disable thumbnail generation for *all* files in Folder Options, from the Organize menu.
I have a 1.6GHZ Pentium M and an 300GB HD in an external SATA enclosure. The first H264 MKV I load makes the HD grind for 15 secs, but subsequent and different MKVs load up within 1-2 seconds like AVIs. I think it is because of a setting in the Haali media splitter. I turned off “try to open linked files.” Hopefully that will decrease the load time to normal.
By the way, have you seen Shinsen-Subs h264 Ergo Proxy? The encoding is so beautiful.
Haven’t been able to get this to work at all. Not too sure why actually to be quite honest. I’m running the 64-bit version of Windows Vista RTM from MSDN, and had been using the ffdshow 64bit codec’s people recommended. But as everyone knows, Windows Media Center does not properly play MKV’s nor was I able to get subtitles to work, so I decided to try out your method of getting this to work - only to come up short with no avail.
If anybody has any idea’s of how this might be able to work, please let me know.
Cheers,
Danny
I played around with the 64-bit Vista RTM, and found that while everything worked in the 32-bit version of WMP11, nothing at all worked with the 64-bit version of WMP11.
The problem with MCE, is that it uses the 64-bit libraries, not the 32-bit ones. As you said, there’s a 64-bit version of ffdshow, but as for Haali’s Media Splitter, or DirectVobSub, they’re only 32-bit right now - and those two elements are what you need for MKV’s and subtitles.
Long story short: It works in the 32-bit WMP11, but not in 64-bit WMP11 or 64-bit MCE. Vista x64 doesn’t include a 32-bit MCE, so until Haali rewrites his media splitter for 64-bit, and someone redoes VobSub, it’s not going to work.
WOA MAN, thanks a lot, you saved me, now i can see my MKV/OGM animes with subtitles again!
This really works, considering that i don’t have a fresh installation of Vista i tried anyways, done every single step and it really worked, awesome!
Thank you Jaymz, this was a great help!!!
Recommendation from CCCP staff: The special options and patches as shown in this guide should not be used. The CCCP should be used as is with nothing added.
If in the case you think the defaults truly are not working under Vista, you should contact the CCCP staff in order to better the situation. Then once again you can just install CCCP without making special changes for Vista. To our knowledge everything should work under 32bit mode, since all of the filters in the CCCP are 32bit applications.
I am guessing the maker of this guide simply felt some of the changes she/he made were more optimal. Otherwise they are not required for Vista playback.
I’ve actually made a few changes of my own to the reg files since then, but essentially the purpose of this guide, and the registry hacks are to get things working under MCE in Vista - complete with video previews and the like. At the time of writing, CCCP wouldn’t even install under Vista - and while it does now, you can’t just throw it on and have MCE work right off the bat. So no.. the defaults don’t work, at least not for that specific scenario. The patches don’t just set the perceived type settings (which CCCP now does), they also tell DirectShow that MKV/OGG/OGM/MP4, etc are allowable media formats, stopping WMP11 from bitching when you try to open an MKV/OGM/etc file, and MCE from.. well… not playing them outright.
Furthermore, the Media Player Classic configuration is so you don’t get constant swapping between basic/aero mode when playing video files - which is what would occur under the RC builds if you didn’t use VMR9.
As I said, most of this was done to deal with shortcomings that installing CCCP would bring under the RC builds of Vista, with some of my own preferences thrown in, in case people weren’t aware of better options available to them.
Thanks! Got it to work… But… Though it works fine in Windows Vista (retail) in Windows Media Player, ánd it works in Windows Media Center…….. It won’t work when using the Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. When I select the .mkv file while using the 360 as a Media Center Extender, it says that the file type is not supported and that a codec might be required. But since the file will play fine on the desktop pc itself, I guess the codec is fine right?
Any ideas? Thanks…
The Xbox 360 only plays back WMV, MPEG, and maybe MPEG2. It doesn’t support anything else, regardless of whether you have the codecs installed for it.
Sucks, I know, but it’s Microsoft’s choice.
holy shit, it works!! Thank you god for sending this man to this site where I bumped into=). YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAy:P
Hey, this worked perfect as far as thumbnails goes. ^^
But i just noticed that my .mp4, .ogm and .mkv files just wont open with MPC.
They play fine in MPC if i manually play them from the player… but even though they are properly associated with MPC, they just open with WMP.
Im pretty confused.. any ideas would be great.
Thanks!
I explained this in the second last paragraph.
“Now, as I explained before - these set the default player to Windows Media Player 11, for compatibility’s sake. You’ll have to change these to Media Player Classic (or your own sucky DirectShow based media player of choice) from either the Default Programs section of the Control Panel, or changing file associations with the Open With… menu in any Explorer window. Why? Because it doesn’t work from within Media Player Classic, that’s why. Not even in Admin mode.”
Great! Works well, but I still can’t get .MOV files to play with WMP11 or show thumbnails in Explorer windows. Any tips?
I have not use your program but it I have no problem loading FFDSHOW when loading WMP11 to watch my movie. What I have problem with is converting the file. vobsub or ffdshow will not load. Vista keep giving me error that it can’t find *.dll file. will your program fix this problem? will you be able to help?
i did this and it worked fine as far as being able to access the files perfectly fine on the vista machine on WMP11
However i decided to test out the feature of streaming video through your network with the WMP11 on vista. That way i could watch the vids on my laptop from a different room and keep all the files iteslf on the desktop which definatly has more storage space.
I setup both pc’s to do the steps you listed in order to make it so the player recognized everything fine, and it worked.
However when i went to share, the machine with the files in the library. (Desktop). Would crash WMP and not let me stream the OGM files.
Has anyone else bothered to try yet and gotten it to work? If so…how? Im honestly not sure how to go about making it possible.
Very helpful… mkv playing on this new POS vista box. cant wait to get home from this trip and wipe it and load MacOSX or Gentoo
Awesome, worked fine :D
Watching 1080p x.264 .mkv-file in WM11 right now
Cheers
Enozekun
VISTA X64 –> WARNING
DO NOT install these .reg files for Vista x64. Not only do they not generate thumbnails for any of the promised file types, they also BREAK ALL .AVI THUMBNAILS.
You are the BOMB!!!!! Step by step and in one take!!! I suspect that if its able to function properly with subtitles, then it will also burn onto DVDs the same way!!! Finally we have CCCP and Windows Media Center working together!!!! I just took a .mkv file and it ran through the Media Center without even a hiccup!!! I did change the font, however I guess that since some subtitles are preinstalled, that they will only work. But the others did change…..good work, Sakura. I bookmarked this page and I will pass the knowledge around.
Crap - ran this in Vista x64. While it worked for Media Player - doesn’t work in Media Center. And now I see that it screws up Thrumbnails. Is there anyway to remove this (I only ran the .mkv reg file). Do I have to do a clean install of vista x64 now?
I have already gotten WMC to be able to preview and play .mkv files. And right now I can also play .mkv files in WMP just fine. However, I am having problems adding .mkv files to the WMP Library. It just doesn’t seem to recognize them as videos in the folders monitored. Do you have any clue on how to resolve this? Much appreciated.
Thanks.
64BIT Haali (or whatever his name is)
So after a lot of searching, it seems K-Lite have released a 64bit codec pack which includes an x264 decoder. Hurray for us 64Bit users. Worked right off the bat, with horrible green lines everywhere. I turned on “de-interlacing” in the settings and now its perfect.
MC aint that bad under it all
KLite 64Bit pack:
http://www.start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=610&Itemid=72
Hey, is there also a way to get thumbnails of FLV videos in my explorer?
Hi
I have a Vista X64, and i have just been though this walkthrough.
I can play mkv files in zoom player, and Media player classic. But when opening the files in MCE, i get “Codec not found”. Anyone have an idea to what i can do next?
I have run all the reg files.
I tried to install the 64BIT hali drivers, but i get an error at end, that it cannot register in registry.
Regards
This is a great tutorial it worked for me many thanks for that!
The alternative to this is to do something simple in setup, or to go back into configuration. It solved every problem I had and I am running Vista 64 Bit.
On the last page of the settings is an option “Autoload VS Filter” Just click it, if it doesn’t work for you it’s just a setting, not like installing other fixes.
ty. i made my own .flv one from these.
Thank you so much! I finally can watch my favorite Canon. Thanks…………
Hi Thanks
Works great with one small problem, when i run a .ts file it runs faster than it should.
Is there anything i can change to slow it back down to normal speed, im running vista ultimate.
Thanks
Tom
Thanks very much for the tutorial and the hard work; very much appreciated; I can now play most file type in my mediacenter :)
I wanted to say thank you for you skills and time in putting together this nfo. Your knowledge was extremely useful as well as accurate thanks again
Nick wrote:
So far so good. I do get an error when it tries to get thumbnails for most OGM files (80004002). I’ve had one MKV file give an error of “Invalid first byte of EBMIL ID: 00″, but that one I get every time I select it, not just when explorer tries to get a thumbnail and is probably due to the fileitself. But I think the OGM error is very annoying when you navigate to a folder where there are numerous files and you have to click OK for each one before you can interact with the window. Out of 26 eps of BlueGender, 2 actually give a thumbnail, the rest gife the “Error: can’t open file: 80004002″ error.
I also get a couple of MKV files that just show black screens for their thumbnails. I’m guessing that’s because it’s pulling the thumbnail from the first frame of the video and not a few minutes into it. Though, this could be a reminant of my previous attempt using your first tutorial. Know any way to fix this?
Answer:
i don’t have Vista installed. but i experienced this on my Windows XP. everytime i accessed a folder which have many ogg files in it and click on the one of the file, i received the same error message. And then i run regedit and find key “ogg” and under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.ogg i change few items:
Content Type from video/x-ogg to audio/mpeg
Perceived Type from video to audio
And restarted explorer (end it by task manager, and re-run it again), and that error message is gone.
Sorry… it doesn’t work… as soon as i restarted explorer that error message is pop up again after some sort of time…. :((
i found the solution… you can search for file splitter.ax inside Program Files and replace it with the new one. after that i found that there is 2 dll missing: mkzlib, mkunicode and 1 dll that doesn’t suit the splitter.ax version i’ve used: mkx.dll. So i began to search the 2 missing files and patch the 1 file that doesn’t suit. After that the error message is gone :P
Hi,
Just wanted to say after not being able to play a lot of .mkv files in Vista Media Centre I followed your tips and EVERYTHING is working perfect..
Thanks man,
Mart
Hey
Thanks for the guide. I tried to adapt the reg hack to flac files, as I have all my cds ripped to flac, but obviously my knowledge of how the registry works is lacking as I did not get it to work. Any chance that you can make a flac reg hack that works?
Rgds
Schroinx
Your reg hack would require a DirectShow FLAC audio filter, which I don’t believe is provided in the CCCP (at least, not in its raw form). From Google, the first hit I came across was this site, but as I don’t have any FLAC or Vorbis audio files, I can’t really comment further on it.
wow…… it actually worked…..
haha… I dont believe it…
ive never personally had codec problems with vista, or xp when I had it, so i was a bit worried and skeptical about this tutorial, as
“it might break my perfectly stable veiwing pleasure, just for the sake of thumbnails”
Is what I thought….but no, i was wrong.. its all good, and I got actual thumbnails for my files now.
so thank you very much for this, the internet is a strange and dodgy place is all
sorry i was doubting
75
So I did everything, except for one thing, the screen never popped up… the windows player VCM untick. But as it doesnt seem a real problem I guess that would not be my problem.
My videos still dont work!! They all have slower images compared to the audio and windows classic still keeps jamming every second. Zoomplayer did not jamm but also had the delayed audio thing.
I tried restarting. Computer went completely nuts, but seemed to get a grip after a few minutes. I decided to delete CCCP. After deletion I noticed the audio slowed down even more on the videos (Well I had to check the videos… just in case).
The audio now seemed like someone was trying to blow out all the tomatojuice out of his tuba, which sounded quite funny actually. :P
So I downloaded K-Lite Coded Pack FULL v4.10. All videos worked again! Even the MP4, but still with some jamming on parts where it fades in and out, sudden flashes and stuff… which means, most of the fighting was more like a lagshow than a real video :( You know how to fix this? (something in the video output I guess..)
Aaah darn I found it allready, I hadnt checked the MP4/MOV filter in Internal Filters…
Hey Idioteque….when you download the K-lite pack full, do you do anything to it? or just download it straight up and play? My .mkv, .mp4, and others besides .avi are NOT working. Need help really bad, this puts a huge dent in the anime selections I could download.
Thanks for the excellent post.
Help! I get no audio track when I am running a DVD or Video_TS file
I am running the current version of CCCP and when I select “No Change” under the FDDShow Audio Settings it won’t save. When I reopen settings it has returned to the previous setting “2/0/0 - stereo”.
I think if I can succesfully change this to “no change” I can get the audio back.
Useless.