Welcome back to another week here at Hack7MC! There’s been plenty of interesting developments in the Media Center community that we’ll be covering in the coming week but first lets take a minute to cover some of the reader questions that were sent in recently.

Question #1 from Greg

Windows (RC) had a great Photo-wall screensaver where it would display your photos (seemingly any and all images), in black & white on a slowly moving wall (similar to the way album covers are shown while playing music), and then one photo would slowly turn to colour, and then cycle through a few photos from the same folder. It would then fade back to black and white and randomly float over the other photos until it found a new set to focus on.

I don’t actually remember doing anything originally to set this up, but now that I am trying the RTM version it doesn’t seem to be doing this any more.

Can you tell me what settings I need to get this working again?

Thanks.

Answer

Certainly, you can check out our recent guide to the Album Art background and the Photo screensaver right here which will give you instructions to enable and choose which photos you’d like displayed by default.

I’m not sure why the feature wouldn’t be enabled by default in the RTM version but I’m sure the instructions will get you setup in no time.

Question #2 from Brian

Is it possible to remap the "movie library" and "recorded TV" icons to their respective folders in Media Browser? I think this would be less confusing for family/friends as well as more aesthetically pleasing for me.

Answer

Unfortunately Media Browser doesn’t currently include support to enter directly into a specific folder though it has been requested. There is, however, a separate branch in development that includes support for this feature though compiling and installing branches can be fairly difficult for most.

I’m not sure if any alternative movie browsers contain such a feature at this point but you can submit the suggestion to Open Media Library as well.

Question #3 from Hunter

It used to be possible to use the My Movies plugin to rip DVD and Blu-Ray discs (as long as the user had AnyDVD-HD installed) to hard drive from within Media Center. Is it possible to have that same functionality in Win7 MC, or to replicate it using an alternative plugin? (If not, I may start working on such a plugin myself…)

Answer

I’m not sure if this is still possible in 7MC or not with the MyMovies plugin as I don’t have much experience with MyMovies myself. I personally would love to see a plugin that allows ripping to the hard disk straight from Media Center with good encoding.

Have a question for a future edition of Reader Question and Answer? Send it in below!

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