Changing Media Center’s Background with Media Center Studio
by Michael Healy @ 9:30 am on April 19th, 2010 in themes with 18 Comments
Let’s face it, after a while Windows 7 Media Center’s background image can become rather dull. Luckily, sprucing it up isn’t exactly rocket science. We can use Media Center Studio to quickly and easily change the default background to one of our choosing. All we need is Media Center Studio and a high resolution image from someplace like interfacelift.com. Make sure to choose an image with a minimum resolution that matches the highest resolution of your monitor. Enlarging images leaves artifacts and pixelation and we don’t want that, especially on the big screen. Another good tip is to pick one with some blue in it as the rest of the Media Center elements are blue.
Now that we’ve got our background we need Media Center Studio. Download and install the program from the author’s site then, make certain Windows 7 Media Center is closed, and launch the program. From the start menu the program can be found under Start –> Programs –> Advent –> Media Center Studio. To get started changing things about in Media Center create a new theme by pressing the New button in the Home ribbon.
Now to change the background we need to expand the Images –> Common –> Background. The images we’re interested in changing at this point are COMMON.ANIMATED.BACKGROUND.PNG and COMMON.BACKGROUND.PNG. Change the images to your newly downloaded background image by pressing the browse button above the original displayed on the right.
You may notice that the images appear extremely small in Media Center Studio for some reason but this doesn’t seem to effect the output. After changing both images save the theme with the Save button at the top then return to the Themes tab at the top and bottom.
Select the newest theme at the bottom, which will be marked with today’s date and time, then press the Apply button at the top under the Themes tab. Then just launch Windows 7 Media Center and everything should be all set, easy.
That’s all there is to it. Much easier than the last time we wrote a guide on changing the background in Windows 7 Media Center. For those looking to get rid of the animated blue images replace the rest of those images listed under background with a transparent png image (right-click -> save as).
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