Getting Internet TV outside the US
by Michael Healy @ 9:45 am on July 25th, 2009 in streaming tv, tv listings with 42 Comments and Permalink
Normally, Windows 7 Media Center only allows residents of the United States to use the Internet TV feature built into Media Center. Since a good portion of the Media Center community lies outside the United States in the UK, Europe and Australia this is a bit of a slight to a large number of users. Luckily, thanks to jem101 over at The Digital Lifestyle we have instructions to get it working for international users as well.
Now before we start, this is going to involve changing registry strings on a nightly basis and downloading updated guide information and packages from Microsoft. There is the potential for this to mess with your program guide or other parts of Media Center in unexpected ways. Also, there is a high chance of Microsoft changing the behavior of Internet TV to block this method in the future since Internet TV for Windows 7 is still in Beta 2.
The first thing you’ll need to do is open up Regedit (start –> “Regedit” –> enter) and locate your current GeoISO2 code. This is a simple country code indicator used by Media Center. Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.GlobalSettings
and take note of the value of systemGeoISO2. Next, download this package which contains two registry files and a cmd file and extract it to your root C:\ drive.
Now open up the Yourloc.reg file in notepad and edit the systemGeoISO2 value to match your current GeoISO2 code and save the file. As long as you’ve properly extracted all the files to C:\ that should be all you need, otherwise you’ll need to edit the cmd file as well with the location you’ve extracted the files to.
At this point right-clicking the cmd file and selecting Run as Administrator should take care of everything and you’ll have access to Internet TV (until the next guide update). The problem is that tomorrow you’ll need to run the program again. So at this point let’s setup a task schedule to do the work automatically for us.
In the start menu type “Task Scheduler” and press enter to open up the task schedule manager. On the right you’ll see a list of actions, select Create Task. Under the general tab give the task a name, description and be sure to set the options to run whether or not someone is logged in and run with highest privileges (on an administrator account) in Windows 7 mode.
If your account doesn’t use a password check the Do Not Store password option as well. Under the Triggers tab create a new trigger and set the program to run each morning before you get up.
Under the Actions tab add a new action to start the cmd program and that should be all you need to setup for this new task.
Now instead of having to run the program manually each morning the system will run it automatically with administrator privileges.
Hopefully that should be all there is to it for you Windows 7 Media Center users living outside the US. I haven’t personally done any extensive testing of this method being from the US so your mileage may vary. Be sure to check out the original tip from Ian Dixon and let him know how you get along with this hack!
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