If you read this blog on a semi regular basis you will know I use Media Center and Vista. Well I have upgraded my MCE2005 to Vista RC1, and using Transcode 360 I bumped into a performance issue.

Transcoding would take nearly twice as long as the video's play time was. This caused an issue because you had to wait for the transcode to finish before you could watch it.

The problem seemed to be that Vista was using the Virtualisation technologies to 'improve' performance.

This did not work, however I found a solution. If you download the latest Windows build of Mplayer/Mencoder and use that instead of the one shipped with Transcode360 (copy here including a load of codecs)

Unrar the file and pop the contents into the Transcode360\Wrappers\MEncoderTranscoder folder on your hard disk.

This works much better as this build tells Vista not to use the Virtualisation and improves performance no end because of it.

EDIT - Just so you know, some of the features that work in RC1 are broken in RC2. If you need to stream on RC2 it must be via WMV8/9 and not MPG2 (the default). This is because Microsoft broke the streaming MPG2 support after RC1. There is a bug in RC1 as well ehen the MC PC does not update the file size of the MPG2 file to the decoder in realtime. This is why you have to wait for the decoding to finish before watching.