To get started with Remote Potato’s newest features we’ll need to download and install the latest version of Remote Potato from FatAttitude. The program will need to be installed on the main Media Center machine only. Remote Potato uses a web-based front end for remote viewing meaning no extra software to install on each machine. Once installed on the Media Center machine access to the front end can be found at http://networkname:9080. This of course is only possible if the proper firewall rules are allowed during setup, which you will be prompted for during installation.

Once installed and running the first thing of note is the revamped start page for Remote Potato. This new look is certainly more stylish and even a little bit entertaining watching the background respond to mouse movements. Those looking for something different can even choose from a few other themes in the Remote Potato server configuration including retro and minimalist. There’s also a blank theme included for those looking to customize for themselves.

The biggest new feature of recent version, however, is the ability to remotely stream Recorded TV to anywhere with access to the internet. Simply press the Recorded TV entry in Remote Potato’s menu to bring up a listing of recorded television. Just choose an episode, press play and select a quality. Here of course is where it gets a little sticky.

In normal quality, over a gigabit network, everything was able to stream from the main Media Center machine (no lightweight machine). Unfortunately, normal quality was terrible to actually watch. Content was fairly blocky during action sequences even on HD content.

Likely this was only due to the quality settings chosen when play began, unfortunately, we couldn’t get HD content to successfully stream over the local network in any higher quality setting than normal. Hopes were high as it is a gigabit network but the buffer would start to climb then abruptly “wonk out” displaying random numbers. Also the server would report all clients disconnected in debug mode’s event viewer.

Standard Definition content was able to be streamed in full quality (Ultra) with considerable success over the local network. There was quite a bit of buffering going on at some points but the show was ultimately watchable in the default view. Under the full screen view, however, there was considerable interlacing visible though when scaling standard definition to 1080p in a web browser this is completely forgivable.

Yet to be tested personally, streaming across the internet is likely to only give worse results with a much more limited available bandwidth to work with. Though the program has spawned an epic thread on The Green Button spanning over 52 pages at this point and the answer may lie somewhere in there to solve our streaming troubles. If you experience any issues the thread appears to be a fantastic place to get technical support for Remote Potato bot from the community and the project owner carlosp_uk.

Browsing around to the older features of the program this is one thing Remote Potato still does extremely well. Remote scheduling of recordings and viewing of the TV guide have become much more stylized and easier to use. New features include loading the EPG data, including channel icons, directly from the Media Center machine as opposed to retrieving them on each client machine.

With new selectors for popular times of the day and the ability to quickly select later dates it’s almost easier to use than the built-in Media Center TV guide. Shows are now colored coded similar to the option available in Windows 7 Media Center and any icons added by My Channel Logos are loaded automatically.

Search the guide from the main menu as well as managing scheduled recordings and even series schedules, Remote Potato still does all of this very well. Even better it’s all complete free and open-source, two of our favorite words. Be sure to give Remote Potato a try, it’s definitely worth the time to install and even seems to run straight out of the box very well. Even if you haven’t the need for remote scheduling capability it’s interesting to see what’s slowly becoming possible with Windows 7 Media Center.

MCPrioirty gives you an easy way to close any program and return to Media Center’s main interface. Created by dbarak on The Green Button forums, the program checks a simple text file each time Windows Media Center is launched and attempts to close each process on the list. To get started download the latest version of the app from the forums or this Hack7MC mirror of version 1.0.

Once downloaded the program is nothing more than a simple executable file and a text file, there is nothing to install per say. However, in order to get the program to launch with Windows you will need to set it up to do so manually. The simplest way to accomplish this is to explore the actual Startup folder and add a short cut. Open the start menu, find Programs –> Startup, right-click and select Explore. This will open a folder, create a new shortcut by right-clicking the MCPriority exe file and selecting Create Shortcut then place the shortcut in the Startup folder.

Now the program should launch each time Windows restarts. The next step is to define which programs you’d like to keep closed while running Windows Media Center. Open the ProcessList text file and you’ll notice that both Hulu and Boxee are already on the list. To add more simply create a new line and add the name of the process to the text file. You’ll need to obtain the actual process name from the Task Manager (Start –> search “task manager” –> view running…). Have the program running and find it under the Processes tab, leave out the .exe and list the process name in the text file on a new line.

Without being able to look at the code it’s hard to say exactly how often the code will execute though. It may run each time the green button is pressed or only when Windows Media Center is brought into focus initially. Hopefully the code is made open source as we love to see with any Windows 7 Media Center plugins and helper apps.

Either way the handy little program gets the job done closing unwanted apps with the push of a big green button and returning you to Windows Media Center. If you’re looking for an extremely simple way to close pesky background apps be sure to give this one a try. Thanks to dbarak for creating the app and hopefully many continued revisions in the future (and open source code) as well.

Once the correct version of MacroTube for your operating system (32-bit or 64-bit) has been installed launch the plugin from the extras menu of Windows Media Center. This first page gives you a few options to choose which video service you’d like to peruse or to set a few basic settings. Currently the only available settings are language, automatic updates and some (very) basic appearance options. Luckily the appearance of MacroTube requires little tampering to look very pleasing on your big screen.

After choosing which service you’d like to browse not only does MacroTube keep from overloading you with millions of videos in row after row or too few videos with uber-sized icons but you’ll also be given several options for narrowing your search. The plugin has the basic narrowing options including date, rating, views and relevance but also includes a fantastic search feature and categorical breakdown.

Searching the services is a snap, just select the Search button and enter in your query using the onscreen keyboard, Media Center remote or standard keyboard and go. The results are speedy and accurate taking only seconds to begin compiling a list of relevant video content. Once each page loads it can take a few moments to fully load the preview pane for video content which can be slightly disconcerting at times however.

MacroTube certainly goes a long way toward making streaming services look good on the Media Center. Each video will display the title, date, rating and short description of the content below in the standard Media Center fashion. In fact at no point does the plugin look entirely out of place in the standard Media Center setup, though the onscreen keyboard won’t match what you find in most Media Center screens.

Playing the videos was also extremely seem-less. Just as if changing the channel or starting a new movie from your collection the video goes right to full screen and begins playing along with all the fast forward, rewind and other manipulation options. MacroTube does streaming video so well on the Media Center it actually takes the medium from being a chore to being somewhat fun (from someone who isn’t that into online streaming videos).

Those who enjoy streaming services such as YouTube should definitely give MacroTube a try on their Media Center setup. You’ll likely find it easy to use and even better a convenient way to find the video you’re looking for to show all your friends. MacroTube made it easy to locate any video with it’s handy search feature saving the time of searching through scattered categorical systems for that one video.

Upon first entering Internet TV from the main start menu, listed under the TV strip, you’ll be required to agree to the first in a series of end user agreements. Several sections of the new application require you to agree to extensive user agreements, a small price to pay to finally get the functionality Media Center needs to stay relevant in a world of ever more powerful cable and satellite company provided DVR boxes.

The new Internet TV application’s most apparent change is an extremely improved interface in terms of both design and functionality. The most popular shows are listed in a large format at the top of the interface, allowing you to quickly select and watch full episodes from a number of channels including CBS, PBS and the Zune Videocast library. This new interface is very reminiscent of the menu systems featured on the Xbox gaming consoles from Microsoft and it’s likely the company is finally utilizing it’s stable of talented interface developers for Media Center projects (or they’re at least talking to one another).

Scrolling down to the lower menus you’ll find a listing of previews for upcoming shows, available channels featuring full episodic content, top shows and a full lineup of news content. Hopefully Microsoft will be working on developing relationships which other networks such as NBC, ABC and Fox who’ve already shown a willingness to develop relationships with other internet broadcasting services such as Hulu. Here you’ll also find a listing for the popular Netflix movie service.

Entering the Netflix application you’ll need a Netflix unlimited subscription to enable downloading and viewing movies from your Windows 7 Media Center. Just agree to the Netflix user agreement and enter your username and password to enable Netflix viewing. You’ll also see a popular Netflix movies strip in the main Internet TV interface listing a handful of popular selections from the service.

To the actual meat of the application, streaming full episodic content, the first thing you’ll notice is the addition of Adobe Flash support to the Windows 7 Media Center program. This is important being easily the most popular format for distribution of broadcast network television over the internet. Most networks are now providing flash episodes through their corporate websites as well as other third party services. For years Microsoft has resisted this addition to the Media Center arsenal but it’s an integral part of the streaming TV revolution and was only an eventuality if Media Center was to remain the product it aspires to be.

After updating Media Center to include Adobe Flash you’ll be able to select recent episodes from a show listing, whether by channel or show. Each channel even includes a few sorting options to help you locate the program your interested in, though the listings are per channel. Perhaps as time progresses we’ll see a longer timeline of shows available as the product matures, currently only the most recent episodes are available. This, of course, is a vast improvement over the previous Internet TV offering however.

Launching an episode you’ll be presented with the customary commercial introduction along with an episode name and description. Selecting the content box will enabled full screen content viewing once the commercial has finished.

Typically this is about the time we get around to the downside and in this case it’s downright huge. In an era of HD everything and high quality video even on sites like Youtube the quality of content provided by Microsoft’s Internet TV application is still utter crap. There’s no sidestepping or candy coating the situation to be had. Watching NCIS or How I Met Your Mother inside Internet TV is almost painful, especially for those accustomed to watching those shows in HD.

We had hoped that the addition of Flash to the Windows 7 Media Center arsenal would lend itself to an improvement in video quality and perhaps it will in the future. For those truly desperate to catch the latest episodes of their favorite shows from the handful of partners provided there are much better methods to get your content fix. The convenience can’t be beat, free streaming internet TV from your couch, but the video quality seems almost defeatist.

Under the Stream menu tick the option to Allow Internet access to home media. This will bring up a dialog allowing you to setup an online ID provider. Select the option to Add an online ID provider.

At this point only Windows Live online identifications are capable of connecting your Windows libraries over the internet but that’s to be expected. I wouldn’t expect to see any alternative providers in the near future either.

Once you’ve added Windows Live as an online ID provider select the option to Link online ID. If this is the first time you’ve setup a Windows Live online link you’ll be prompted to download the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant. Select and install the component that matches your operating system from the Microsoft Download site. Both x86 and x64 versions are available.

After successful installation you’ll be able to add a Windows Live account to your Windows Live ID provider. Once you’ve entered your account information you’ll see a success notification.

Repeat the process on each PC you’d like to access media on and each will appear under the Other Libraries item in the left hand pane. You’ll now be able to stream any non-DRM content from one PC to another remotely.

That’s all there is to it. Stay tuned to Hack7MC to get even more coverage of remote streaming features in Windows 7 as well as integrating Live Mesh into your Home Theater setup. Thanks to Simon May for pointing us in the direction to enable this great feature!

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!

The first step you’ll need to do for all of these methods is to download the new Hulu Desktop client from the Hulu Labs website. Once you’ve done that you could do things the manual way and follow the guides on Hack7MC for Media Center Launcher and Configurator then Creating New Start Menu Strips. You could also edit one of these registry files included in the Extra Programs for our Media Browser menu strip and add Hulu Desktop to that strip.

Although, if that seems like an awful lot of legwork to you there are a few other options to have a look at. The first is this solution from Missing Remote providing a plug-in and some directions to add a Hulu Desktop Icon to menu strip. It still requires a bit of work for you and may not work fully with Windows 7 Media Center since additions to the default menu strips are no longer allowed. You should be able to find the new app listed in Extra Programs with this method however.

The other option is a plug-in from SecondRun.tv developer Yaggs. This plug-in is essentially the same as the Missing Remote except slightly simplified. For some reason you’re required to make a copy of the Hulu Desktop application in your root C:\ drive though. This should provide the easiest method for beginners but the least customizability.

No matter which option you choose you’ll get Hulu on your ten foot interface but it won’t be the holy grail. None of these solutions will work on extenders as Hulu desktop is developed entirely in Flash. The interface could carry some learning curve as well for the less technical family members since it’s quite a departure from the Media Center interface.

This may signal some level of receptiveness to distribution of Hulu content outside the browser but I wouldn’t hold your breath for Microsoft and Hulu to sign a deal any time soon. In fact, I’d expect to see Microsoft pushing it’s abhorrent Internet TV betas on us for the next decade or so.

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Media Browser

Get all that Juicy Metadata

The first step to any good media collection is metadata. Media Browser does a fairly good job of getting comprehensive metadata for your collection on it’s own but sometimes you may want a little more control. In that case, have a look at MediaScout and Media Center Master. Both provide superior metadata retrieval and integrate extremely well with Media Browser.

Add Encoding Details to the Interface

Can’t keep track of which of your videos is high definition or which ones have full surround sound? Display that encoding info right inside Media Browser with this simple trick. Just download MediaInfo and follow these steps to get enable the feature inside the Media Browser details screen.

Fill in those Actor Images

That actors tab in your movie details isn’t very pretty with all those blank images adorning your cast list. Why not fill those blank images in using portraits from the ImagesByName project. Just follow these directions and you’ll have quite an impressive collection of actor portraits available for Media Browser to use in no time!

Add Movie Trailers to your Movie Details

While it’s not quite streaming movie trailers it’s still possible to get trailers for each of your movies inside Media Browser’s details page. Use a trailer downloading program such as HD Movie Trailer Downloader or Get Trailers, then follow these simple steps to add an icon to your movie’s details page. Then you’ll have instant access to all your movie trailers while browsing through your collection.

Give those Blank Folders a Custom Look

Why leave those ugly blank folders messing up an otherwise sleek interface? Instead download our collection of custom icons (or use you own) and add them to your folders instead. Don’t stop there either, make sure that you preserve those transparent backgrounds and avoid that homely blue box as well.

Top it off with a Custom Start Menu

Why not top it all off by creating a custom start menu just for Media Browser? You can even remove the old Movie strip so you don’t confuse your friends and family with multiple movie browsing programs. Also, for those with a few of the most popular streaming media plug-ins (secondrun.tv, playon with playit, tunerfree mce and tubecore) installed can add them to the menu as well!

Don’t forget to sign-up for one of our free subscription methods here at Hack7MC to stay on top of the latest Media Browser tweaks!

Included in this pack are registry files for adding four popular streaming TV plug-ins on the start menu strip:

1. SecondRun.tv
2. PlayOn with PlayIt
3. TunerFree MCE
4. tubeCore

For these new menu items to work you’ll need to have each of the plug-ins installed then apply the proper registry file for each plug-in you’d like included. Separate registry files for each plug-in were included for easier customization, allowing you to only apply the entries you’d like to appear.

To remove any of the entries from the strip apply the registry entry for that plug-in with the word “_disable” appended to the filename. This sets the “Enabled” string to “False”, removing that plug-in from the menu strip.

Finally, here’s what you’ve been waiting for, download the package and unzip to your hard drive. Then double-click the proper registry files to enable each plug-in entry.

For even more on creating your own start menu strips, check out this guide on creating your own menu strips from scratch!

Using TunerFree is as easy as installing the plug-in and then allowing it to retrieve a cache of the videos available. During installation you will even be presented with the option to only include stations available in your area. For example Hulu is only available in the US while BBC is only available in the UK. Once installed the configuration options even include the ability to add a custom proxy, enabling content from both regions.

Finding your favorite show in TunerFree is a straight forward affair, just select a station or category then choose the show from a list of those available. TunerFree will even keep track of your favorites automatically and add them to a selection in the service selection screen. Each show even includes a clip from the show displayed in the selection window.

The plug-in does suffer from a few familiar limitations of streaming TV plug-ins. Listings for shows are unorganized and the episode title and number is only displayed at the bottom of the screen when hovering over an episode. The episode selection also seems a bit limited though this can be dependant on the service not the plug-in.

TunerFree also suffers from the same bug as SecondRun.tv when exiting a playing show, the sound doesn’t quite stop for a few moments afterward. The accuracy of the full screen ability doesn’t seem to be as finely tuned at some resolutions as it could be as well. The author of the plug-in, Martin “Millie” Millmore, is quite dedicated to updating the plug-in on a regular basis however and the installer already supports Windows 7.

Despite a few bugs TunerFree MCE is a solid offering in the way of bringing streaming TV into your Media Center setup. Though the full screen bugs and sound issues will keep most users from full time family room use, this plug-in is on the fast track to becoming a mainstay in replacing your cable or satellite bills. Be sure to grab TunerFree MCE and give it a try, especially if you’re in the UK!

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