DivX and Vista MC

I wasn't really sure if I should put this here or in the OS forum or in the Software forum so please excuse me if I guessed wrong.

I've noticed a fair amount of people having the same problem as me. That is if you view a folder with divx encoded .avi files in the media center browser it is prone to crashing. Well the xvid codec works fine for playback of DivX and won't crash Vista Media Center. However, if your like me and like to encode using the Divx codec then uninstalling Divx is a problem. I've discovered a method buried in the internet (yay google) for disabling Divx for playback while retaining its encoding functionality for whatever encoding program you may use, and I thought I'd share it here.

Run cmd.exe with Administrator powers.

Type "regsvr32 /u divxdec.ax" (without quotes) and hit enter.

You should get a popup box confirming the command you just made to the command prompt.

This disables divx from being used for playback by any player, and if Xvid is present that will be used instead for Divx decoding.

If I were you I'd just use ffdshow. The problem is when the library tries to create the thumbnails for each file. Ffdshow doesn't crash Vista Media Center and I had the same problem you did. In the settings just have ffdshow decode divx content using the build in codec rather than divx. When you want to encode your own files, you can utilize divx then.