Those of you running Windows Media Center within Windows Vista Ultimate or Vista Home Premium Edition will be happy to know that Microsoft has released their April 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center (for Vista only). Check to see if you’ve already installed the update - it’s a “Recommended” update - not a critical one.

According to Microsoft’s support page here, these are the issues that have been resolved with this update:

  • The video may appear to freeze when the movie begins in some DVDs.
  • When you rotate a picture during a slide show in Windows Media Center, the wrong photo may be rotated.
  • The cover art for recorded TV movies may not appear in the DVD library view.
  • When you delete a picture in Windows Media Center, you may receive an error message that resembles the following:

AUDIO ERROR
The Url contains one or more invalid characters.

  • When you try to play a DVD by using Autoplay, you may receive an error message that resembles the following:

Tuner not installed

 

These are the improvements found in this update:

  • Online Media support has been added for Windows Media Center on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate.
  • Video Playlist support has been added for Windows Media Center Extenders.
  • Improvements have been made to Online Media caching.

Finally, here’s an interesting note about Windows Media Center Extenders from Microsoft (pertaining to Extenders and any firewall that might be on your PC):

Windows Media Center Extenders, such as the Microsoft Xbox 360, use network ports to communicate over the network to computers that are running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate. This cumulative update contains updates to Media Center programs that may have been previously configured as “approved” or “allowed” by a third-party firewall. If you use a third-party firewall, you may have to manually update your firewall to let the new versions of these programs access the ports. If you do not perform these firewall updates, you may experience failures when you try to connect the Windows Media Center Extender to the Media Center computer.

[Check out the support page]

Technorati Tags: , , , ,