HTPC Tip Of The Day: DVDs On Extenders

A couple of tips today.

1. Don’t get caught up in the HD-PVR single tuner only fuss yet. All we know is that the bundled application from hauppauge supports a single tuner and that the drivers are multiple-tuner capable. I would imagine SageTV and the like will have no problem taking advantage of this. I emailed Hauppauge for clarification, hopefully I hear back.

The no 64-bit driver is a little annoying, hopefuly the rectify that in short order.

2. You can now use the DVD library with extenders!! Go to this page here for the guide. This is a new guide so be wary of it borking something!

Media Center Extenders can’t play .vob files, so the files have to be renamed to .mpg files. But wait! If I rename all the .vob files to .mpg files then other apps may stop working right? Correct. So, the solution is symbolic links. A symbolic link is a fake file with the name you want that links back to the original file. So VTS_01_1.mpg is a symbolic link that points to VTS_01_1.VOB. That also means you do not get anything other than the main movie.