Use Your Favorite DirectShow Decoder In Windows Media Player & Media Center
You may know that Windows 7 uses its own set of media codecs to decode certain type of audio and video formats, when using the native utilities. This can be a major hindrance for folks who watch their videos using Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center, as the default Windows decoder is a little bland, when compared to third-party decoders such as the likes of ffdshow, CoreAVC, MPCVideoDec etc. Although, you can use a few registry tweaks to force Windows to use third-party filters, we understand that not everyone wants to take the risk of playing with Registry Editor anyway. Win7DSFilterTweaker provides a simple solution to this very problem. The software has been developed to force Windows Media Player or Media Center to use any of your favorite DirectShow video decoder. It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of third-party DirectShow filters including LAV Video, ffdshow, MPCVideoDec, CoreAVC H.264, DivX MPEG-4, Gabest MPEG-2, Bitcontrol MPEG-2, MONOGRAM AAC and so on.
The main interface of the application consists of a minimalistic design, containing 3 buttons in total, which includes Preferred decoders, Tweaks and Media Foundation.
Clicking Preferred decoders opens up a separate console, from where you can set your favorite decoding filter that you want use. While it holds both 32-bit and 64-bit filters, both filters are placed separately, containing a wide array of formats such as H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV, DV, AAC, MP3 etc. It’s worth mentioning that you can set different filters for each format which is a great feature to restrict application from using a single filter for every format. In filter selection, you may choose the USE MERIT option to let the application itself decide the best decoder for the video file.
The Tweaks window allows you to disable the native codecs via marking the codecs that you don’t want to use. It allows you to toggle MP3 Decoder DMO, Microsoft DTV-DVD Audio Decoder, Mpeg4s Decoder DMO, Mpeg43 DMO and more.
However, if you want to force the tool to avoid using Media Foundation only for a few media formats, open Media Foundation window from main window, and disable its support for 3G2, 3GP, 3GPP, AVI, M4A, MP4, MOV, WAV etc.
Win7DSFilterTweaker is available as portable application and can be grabbed for free. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit OS editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Testing was carried out on Windows 7, 64-bit.
