Peter Near’s blog has a post on adding ATSC support to your Media Center box: First, some background. Like the United States, Canada has decided to transition all television broadcasts from analog to digital. These new digital signals have greater effective range, provide a crystal-clear high definition picture, and as with all over the air network TV broadcasts are free [...]
At times installing codecs for all your music, movies and what have you seems to be 30% science, 70% voodoo. Fortunately, there is a way to double-check our brew to make sure it’s running the way we originally intended. GraphStudio will allow you to load your media files and show you the codecs being used to render it. It will [...]
As a follow-up to a comment placed ealier in the “Adding Weather to Media Center” article I realized there is a bug I forgot to mention in the previous posting. This will undoubtedly only apply to the Beta builds of Windows 7 though it’s something we need to work around until a fix is released. It seems that certain MSI [...]
All too often perfectly good plug-ins get left by the wayside with their original designers moving on to other projects and interests and these programs are simply left to rot. Unfortunately this rot takes it’s toll over time with updates to the main program and even the under lying operating system. Recently, with the release of the official Windows 7 [...]
One of the few things lacking in Media Center has been an easy way to view your local weather without tuning in a news station. Since support for this is still left out in 7MC we have to turn to a plug-in to fill the gap. Heatwave, originally developed by MCExtended on The Green Button, is an elegant solution to [...]
Also, check out our guide to MKVs in Windows 7 Media Center! Currently Windows Media Player and Media Center don’t include native file support for a number of lossless audio codecs including FLAC, OGG, and basically anything other than Microsoft’s own WMA files. There is a cure for this minor omission though so no worries. We suggest that 32-bit users [...]
Hard drive space isn’t necessarily expensive, that is until you consider the amount of disk space required to archive your 300+ disk DVD collection to your Media Center pc. With each regular DVD clocking in at around 4gb, let’s not even mention bluray disks, the cost can add up quickly. So what we need is a way to compress those [...]
Since this article a flurry of Metadata tools have come along to fill the void in Media Center’s Movie Library Synopsis view including DVD Library Manager, MediaScout, My Movie Finder, YAMMM, Media Center Master and more! To find the latest on Metadata downloading programs and tools check out our Metadata articles and guides or subscribe to the Metadata RSS feed [...]
It seems that although MP4 file are natively supported by Media Center’s codec the Movie Library doesn’t show these files by default. To add these files to the Movie Library we will do much the same as we did for the MKV files. Download either the x86 reg file or x64 reg file depending on your version of Windows and [...]
Don’t like codec packs? Try this: MKVs for Minimalists on Windows 7 The first step to playing MKV (Matroska) video files in your Media Center is to make sure your system is capable of playing MKV files in the first place. There seem to be innumerable ways to accomplish this and everyone has their own preference. For the sake of [...]
Adding ClearQAM channels to your Windows7 Media Center can be quite a daunting process. With regard to previous version of Media Center though it’s still quite an improvement as before there was no native support for ClearQAM whatsoever. ClearQAM is generally broadcast in the United States through your cable provider and typically only consists of the basic broadcast channels you [...]
Yesterday I posted about a simple yet effective way to edit the programs in your extras library. Today I’m going to lead you to a pair of programs that make it simple to add, edit and remove new listings from your program library. The first is Media Center Launcher, which can be found for download from Mikinhosoft in both x86 [...]
Adding applications or games to the Extras Library is probably one of the most desirable features of serious media center users. Despite this Microsoft has neglected to add a simple and user friendly way to accomplish the task. It should be a simple task, go through a gui wizard, choose your desired app, and hit finish. Maybe in the future [...]
