Return of the Geek

My Qosmio seems to have given up the ghost so my mind is turning to the vexed issue of digital media again. We've built an XP Media Center PC that I'm going to take home, and we've got Vista Ultimate Edition running on a 64 bit box in the office.

My Movies won't run on the 64-bit OS, so we've been digging around for a way to play backed up DVDs from the hard disk.

From the SDK, it seems that - from an HTML page registered in Media Center - the call:

window.external.MediaCenter.PlayMedia(4,strUrl);

Plays the passed strUrl as a DVD.

An strUrl encoded as, say "DVD://C:/DVD/DVD1/VIDEO_TS" will play the default opening file on DVD backed up to C:/DVD/DVD1/ on a local hard disk.

This also seems to work with UNC filenames, so using "DVD://SERVERNAME/C$/DVD/DVD1/VIDEO_TS", for example, as the strURL would enable you to play a backed up DVD over a network!

Adding a ? after the URL, enables you to pass parameters:

?2 Plays Title 2
?5/13 Play Chapter 13 of title 5
?6/2-8 Plays Chapters 2 to 8 of title 6
?7/9:05-13:23 Plays title 7, from 9 seconds 5 frames to 13 seconds 23 frames (times specified as hh:mm:ss:ff)

There doesn't seem to be any reason why this technique wouldn't work in the XBOX 360 Media Extender which suggests to me that we might well be able to knock up some code that will give me online access to all my movies via the games machine.

I've created a new label for this type of musing, even though I don't seem to have done much of it lately.