We took JRiver MC 17 for a test drive with the Vision 3D 252B, and came away quite satisfied. JRiver's Red October initiative enables users to enjoy LAV Filters and the madVR renderer out of the box. It also has a mode in which it can use system filters, but that is not of interest to us in this section. JRiver Media Center 17 is a $50 player with self-contained filters (which can be further configured, if necessary).

Codec packs were designed to solve this problem, but they have a tendency to mess up the system even more. However, a majority of HTPC owners don't have time to play around with different codecs and their merits and other settings. I usually only recommend free open source software for HTPC users (except for Blu-ray playback, where there is no alternative but to pony up for one of the software Blu-ray players). For those wanting things to work out of the box, JRiver Media Center 17 is highly recommended. Again, some customization is needed in MPC-HC in order to utilize these filters. In general, the LAV filters pack is the best supported splitter / decoder combo. Some customization is needed if the user wants madVR as the renderer.

That said, there are some resources online to get your XBMC setup up and running if you are on a Linux machine.įor Windows users, MPC-HC is the software I would recommend for the best experience. Also, users wishing to use madVR as the renderer within XBMC are yet to see their wishes fulfilled. However, HD audio bitstreaming is not yet officially available on XBMC (though I have tried a few alternative builds, none of them have worked in a reliable manner). XBMC's DXVA2 decoder works better on the ASRock Vision 3D 252B compared to the CoreHT 252B, thanks to NVIDIA's well supported DXVA infrastructure. In the CoreHT 252B review, we devoted a section to XBMC and how to configure it to play nice with that particular system.

Jriver review