The most important software for watching movies on the computer is the media player and most of the people use windows built in media player WMP for this or at most powerdvd. The problem with WMP is that it just provide the basic functionality of a media player whereas powerdvd on the other hand is very expensive as well as do not provide much functionality like the one I am about to recommend i.e. Zoom player.
Zoom player is one of the best media player to play all types of media files and provide the options to configure your codecs and other things so deep that at first it looks very overwhelming but over time you start to love these configurations when you get to know that with this one player you can configure it the way you wanted for. A slight contradiction arise, however, which is that zoom player is also not free but this piece of software provide full functionality in demo mode and doesnt at all stop working after the demo is finished, instead it just add a timer before the main program window is opened after you click on the program file.
When Zoom player is first installed it asks you if you want to connect to the install center and download and install the necessary codecs to run all types of files. This will give you the options to install ffdshow a complete media MPEG-4 video decoder (this will decode every xvid and divx file as well as help in playing DVDs), haali media splitter to run metroska (MKV) files, vobsub to display the subtitles (downloaded separately) and some others. I recommend you install everything except decoder’s bass since for the audio a separate codec should be used to get proper sourround sound.
FFDshow is a very power set of tools which can be used to run video files as well as audio stream and can be used to enhance and upscale the video you are watching. This need a separate writing altogether and I will write about how to do this in the coming week.
So now you are done with the video aspect of your software setup, you need to add the codec for the audio processing and for this AC3filter is the only best choice we have. Make sure you setup AC3filter output format to 3/2+SW 5.1 channels to get the proper discrete 5.1 audio from your speakers. There are so many options in Ac3filter just like FFdshow and I will try to cover these in a separate post.
Last but not the least, Direct vobsub is totally optional and its for those who want to watch these movies with subtitles or if you are watching a movie made in a different language than you can understand (Old Boy from Korea is a perfect example of this). This codec will enable your media player to display subtitles which can be downloaded off the internet.
A cheap A4tech wireless keyboard & mouse can be added to this setup to have a remote control over over the media you are playing. This pretty much covers up everything which we need to convert our computer to an effective Home theater machine. However, a few advanced things are described below.
Advanced Setups:
The setup discussed above is the most basic computer home theater setups one can have but there are quite a few out there who have converted their computers in a very advanced manner and these are called HTPC (home theater personal computer) connected to a HDTV and running on a windows media center. I will cover some details about advanced HTPCs later so for now enjoy converting your computer to a basic but effective home theater.
Feel free to comment or ask anything you like here.
source:/teabreak.pk
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