Where's H.264 support in MCX?
KinchE over at Charlie Owen's blog asks the following question:
My question is: What, if anything, is keeping Microsoft from formally supporting H.264 in MCE and Pika?
PS I would love to hear news about v.2 MCX ("Pika") boxes. I'd be happy to see Softsled released, even as part of a commercial MCE Plus! product.
Adding codec support to both Media Center and Media Center Extender is something we do thoughtfully. We have to look at multiple factors like time, money, and amount of content in that format before deciding to add a new codec. Note that codec support does not have to be in sync between MCE and MCX, although we do attempt to do so in the case of the Xbox 360.
If a Pika partner wants to support H.264 or any other codec in their product they can do so. They just need to license the codec and add it to their device. Then when the Pika device asks for the content we will send it over and it will play (vs the error message you get today). As for which Pika partners will support H.264 I cannot say since none have been formally announced. We do not have plans to add H.264 to the Xbox 360 at this time.
For users who have content encoded in a format that MCX does not support you can use 3rd party tools like Transcode 360 (which I use) to stream the content to the MCX.
As for v.2 MCX boxes, see my previous post.
[edit] closing comments on this post since it seems to just get spam..
