Approximately 640 patents worldwide make up the "essential" patents surrounding MPEG-2. These are held by over 20 corporations and one university. Where software patentability is upheld, the use of MPEG-2 requires the payment of licensing fees to the patent holders. The patent pool is managed and administered by MPEG Licensing Authority, a private organization. Other patents are licensed by Audio MPEG, Inc. The development of the standard itself took less time than the patent negotiations.
This essentially means that no one is allowed to create a free MPEG-2 decoder. You will find on the web that there are a lot of CODEC packs out there that say that they handle most of the DVD formats. What they neglect to tell you is that they don't handle the most important one: MPEG-2.
There is a utility that one can download from Microsoft called DECCHECK, that allows you to see what MPEG-2 are installed on a machine. It claims to be for XP, but it also appears to work on Vista. When I look on my HTPC, I see several MPEG-2 decoders on the machine already, including one for Sage. I think that the reason that these aren't working is that they are either 32-bit decoders, or they were designed for XP, because Vista changed how all of this works (of course).
What I think irritates me the most about all of this is that I've already have a very power MPEG-2 decoder built into the 780G graphics chip. All that is needed is a DirectShow decoder filter. This filter does not actually do any work, thus it doesn't need to be licensed. It just passes the stream to the 780G to do the heavy lifting. There is such a decoder filter at SourceForge. Of course, it doesn't work on my machine, probably because of the Vista 64-bit issue.
In some ways, I accidentally shot myself in the foot here because the Home and Ultimate editions of Vista already have a DVD Decoder that ships with them. I, of course, had to buy Business. I have also read that Windows 7 is going to ship with a DVD Decoder in all editions, but I was not willing to wait for that.
There are a lot of Windows Media Player add-ons out there that you can buy that support the MPEG-2 format, but they can only be used by Windows Media Player and many don't support Vista. I purchased and installed the one from Cyberlink because it had a Vista version, and I was hoping that it would be installed as a common CODEC for all media players but, sadly, it wasn't. However, I discovered that SageTV has a setup option for DVD Decoder Filter where I could change it to Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Decoder. This almost works perfectly except that the DVD menus don't work with the remote's arrow keys and the hot spots don't light up when they are hovered over with the mouse cursor. However, hover over a hot spot with the mouse cursor, click and, presto, the menu option is selected and the movie, she plays! Whew! The good news is that Windows Media Player is also able to play DVD's now, although the upscaling is not very good.
So, I'm thinking that I can put this one in the bag, although the lack of the arrow keys working on DVD's is going to make finding Easter eggs harder. Perhaps getting PowerDVD was the right answer after all. Perhaps I shouldn't have went with 64-bit Vista. I've heard good things about Windows 7 and 64-bit CPU's are becoming common place. As consumers, we need to keep pressure on the software vendors to move their applications over to 64-bit CPUs. The conversion is not nearly as painful as the conversion from 16-bits to 32-bits. (For the sake of full disclosure, my own company's software hasn't been converted to 64-bits, and the customers are starting to get really angry.)
So, what's next for my HTPC? I'd like to be able to burn DVD's on it, so I guess that I'll tackle that next. How hard can it be? (HAH!)
Hi Mike:
ReplyDeleteNero 9 includes an MPEG-2 decoder that works in other programs (like VLC media player) as well. Nero is often free-after-rebate at Fry's -- it was just a few days ago. Might be worth a shot if you're still not happy.