If you’ve participated in the Windows 7 program for some time now you may have noticed in more recent versions that the animated waterfall album art background that is displayed while playing music has slowed down considerably. Almost to a “glacial rate” as one user put it. This was done to accommodate lower performance PCs that were having trouble rendering the background at the proper speed and keeping up with the other tasks such as actually playing the music.

Now that’s fantastic but they left out any option to increase or decrease the speed through a simple settings interface. Instead the rate was locked down in the trusty old ehres.dll file. This is bad because it makes it somewhat more difficult to change but it’s good because when opening up this file we find there are a great many possibilities to create custom animated backgrounds with this same file.

For those not interested in the how-to of this, simply download this prefab patch to double the rate at which the album art waterfall scrolls. For the rest of you interested in how this is done and maybe curious about creating your own animated backgrounds you’ll need a resource editor such as Restorator and an XML or plain text editor, preferably XML Notepad which is free from Microsoft download.

Once you’ve got your tools, create a copy of the ehres.dll file from C:\Windows\ehome\. Next, open up Restorator (or your resource editor of choice) and load that copy of the ehres.dll file. At this point you should probably create a backup of this file as well, just in case something should go awry later on.

Now, with ehres.dll open in the resource editor locate the html folder and find the file named albumartbackground.xml. This is the file that contains all the information for use in the album art waterfall background. Extract this file by simply dragging and dropping the file from the resource pane onto your desktop.

Next, open this albumartbackground.xml file in XML Notepad. You should see something similar to the image above. Under the tree view, open up the first UI folder, then the Locals folder and finally the second Timer folder.

The name of this Timer should read TimerForScrolling and by default is set to 2000 (milliseconds). To increase the speed of the scrolling effect you will need to decrease the Interval at which this timer “ticks”. For instance, to double the speed of the scrolling effect set the Interval to 1000. Be aware, however, that at a certain lower interval the animation will not be able to maintain it’s rate and will likely not render properly.

Once you have set your new timer interval, save the XML file and reload it into the resource editor. You should be able to simply drag the file back onto it’s original location in the resource tree. Afterwards, save the new ehres.dll file you’ve created and copy it back into it’s original location in C:\Windows\ehome\ (you will need ownership of the original ehres.dll file).

Now, you may be wondering how you can create your own custom animations using this file. That is something that is indeed possible but somewhat beyond the range of this particular guide. Using the tools above and a little bit of trial and error, however, you should be able to work out some fairly nice effects through this XML.

You can find even more details on editing animation effects for Windows 7 Media Center on MSDN’s guide to editing MCML (Media Center Markup Language). If you do create some nice effects that you’d like to share with the community send them in! Email your custom XML files as attachments to mhealy@hack7mc.com or use this special form.