Microsoft Fixes Major Windows 8 WMC Bug

[Silversee]

Microsoft today released a fix for a major Windows 8 Media Center bug that previously caused severe video quality issues when streaming H.264 video with 5.1 audio tracks to the Xbox 360.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2785094

Installed and tested... works perfectly for me so far.

With this update, Windows Media Center for Windows 8 can *for the very first time* stream H.264 video with AC3 5.1 discreet audio to an Xbox 360 extender WITHOUT use of 3rd party codecs or splitters. For those of us who use the Xbox with personal media collections encoded to H.264, this is a rather significant milestone.

[makryger]

and this never existed for 7mc? Could this be the actual first reason to actually upgrade to W8?

[lithium630]

All of my movies are H264 with AC3 audio. I've never had an issue on my Xbox's so I'm guessing this bug was introduced with Windows 8.

[TheOsburnFamil]

Holy smokes batman! I was just lamenting the fact that all my Bluray > WMVHD rips look like crap on Win8/Extenders on another thread just a couple hours ago! (WMV was the highest "documented" video container/codec bitrate supported by extenders at 15MB, so I ripped all by BDs to WMV/WMA5.1@15mb).

One of the major reasons for not sticking with Win8 was these rips all looked HORRIBLE with the transcoder in Win8 (which, they shouldn't even BE transcoding... but whatever...)

I just upgraded one of my Win8 machines (my HTPC is back on 7 now) with the latest win8 updates... decided to throw one of the Xboxes on it as an extender and "retry" my WMV rips.. they all play perfectly fine now! As do .M2TS rips! (the M2TSs are all Mpeg2/AC3). They still kick off the transcoder (can see it say "...buffering..." when the playback starts)... but they now all play w/o jerkiness or bad transcode quality.

damit-- now if Ceton fixes the 8 tuner issue, I may rethink win8 again.. LOL

[JazJon]

Excellent thanks for the heads up!