Microsoft is working on a answer towards VMware’s virtualization succes. The answer is called Microsoft Hyper-V and is currently in Beta.

Although ive seen this stuff at Microsoft IT Forum in Barcelone last december, i felt like playing around with it myself so i grabbed a HP DL360 with dual quad core and 16Gb mem to test this new toy. So i installed Windows Server Hyper-V RC1. Here’s a little impression with some screenshots.

Please note: Although Windows server 2008 will install on a 32bit CPU based computer, Hyper-V itself needs a 64bit CPU.After the installation i checked the system properties and ‘my computer properties’ dialog:

Next thing to do was install the Hyper-V role:

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So Windows Vista Media center gives you a “Cannot Play Video, One or more codecs required to play to open this content could not be found”.
Are you running the 64bit version of mediacenter? Follow these steps to get it working:

1) Download and install the approperiate decoder, my favorite is ffdshow. You’ll need the 64bit version: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=173941&package_id=229162&release_id=559173
2) Change Media center so it uses the 64bit version of media player instead of the 32bit one
– Open the registry using regedit
– Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\AppPaths\wmplayer.exe
– Remove the ‘x86’ items and make sure afterwards it looks like this: 

(Default) – “%ProgramFiles%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe”
Path – %ProgramFiles%\Windows Media Player

3) Close regedit
4) Open a command prompt and type this: %windir%\system32\unregmp2.exe /SwapTo:64
5) Reboot the media center box
6) Leave a reply if it worked 😉

Now your good to go, Media Center will play your Divx and Xvid!

UPDATE: Somehow it doesn´t work at everyones Mediacenter, please have a look at the comment by FINN, it might help you!

So your trying to download the TV guide within Vista Media Center and your getting error 34 (or 16)?

The answer for this one is easy: Set the correct date and time settings in Windows