Astrotoy7’s Black Theme for Media Center
by Michael Healy @ 9:00 am on April 18th, 2009 in themes with 13 Comments and Permalink
We have covered the Black Theme by Astrotoy7 before but since then the theme has been refined and polished even further. Some of the glow effects have been removed, the “curtain” animation has been taken off the start menu and several other areas have been shored up. This theme definitely is a minimalist’s dream brought to the Media Center interface.
This theme really is quite nice for those looking for a sleek, basic look for their Media Center setup. The black gradients and backgrounds work especially nice while playing back movies or watching live TV. Just enough screen real estate is given up to draw when requesting interface objects so as to not completely obstruct view of the media.
The presentation is especially nice when paired with color channel logos in the TV guide listings.
To make things even easier, a patch file has been produced to install this latest version of the theme. Just download this zip file from Hack7MC.com and extract it to your “C:\Windows\ehome\” directory. If you haven’t already installed the “Take Ownership” registry fix you’ll need to double-click own.reg to install it. Then right-click “C:\Windows\ehome\ehres.dll” and select “Take Ownership”.
Once you’ve taken ownership of “ehres.dll” (if you have previously installed a Media Center theme ownership should already be set) right-click the patch file and select “Run as Administrator”. Start the patch once the window appears and wait for it to complete.
That should be it, just re-launch Windows 7 Media Center to make sure the new theme has been applied. This version of the theme should work on almost all builds of Windows 7 beta but full compatibility is not guaranteed. To roll-back to the previous ehres.dll locate “ehres Backup.dll” and rename to “ehres.dll”.
Enjoy your new sleek black Media Center interface! Be sure to stop by the Australian Media Center Community Forums and let Astrotoy7 know what you think as well.
To get transperencies in, you actually just need to change 3 overlay images for the start menu and one for the mini guide.
