Hacking Windows 7 Media Center

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Setting a Shoutcast Alarm Clock in Media Center

Setting a Shoutcast Alarm Clock in Media Center

With this handy tip from Marc, a reader of Hack7MC, we can setup a regular alarm clock using Task Scheduler, mcShoutcast and Media Center. Much like your standard alarm clock this setup will be set to wake each morning and start a radio stream. Users can setup the alarm to wake regularly on weekdays, weekends or whenever you need [...]

The Short List of Small Fixes for Windows Media Center

The Short List of Small Fixes for Windows Media Center

While these may not be fixes in the traditional sense, nothing is actually broken, but they do go a long way to altering and improving the default Media Center experience. There are several options available for adjusting Media Center’s displays that don’t require extra programs or even installations in most cases. These small fixes can make a rather big [...]

Moving Windows Media Center Radio Presets

Moving Windows Media Center Radio Presets

It’s an often overlooked feature of Windows Media Center, the Radio, but most likely everyone has at least one FM tuner available in their Media Center machine. If you’re one of those people who frequently uses Media Center’s Radio feature you’re likely interested in backing up your lineup of Radio presets. There currently aren’t any programs available that incorporate [...]

Creating a Windows 7 Lite for Media Center Users with vLite

Creating a Windows 7 Lite for Media Center Users with vLite

Sure, Microsoft already offers a slimmed down version of Windows 7 known as Starter which is light enough to run on even the trimmest of netbooks. Not to mention that standard version of Windows 7 are excellent performers as well but there’s always room for improvement and the Starter version of WIndows 7 doesn’t include things like Media Center. [...]

Creating a Windows 7 USB Install Drive with official Microsoft Tool

Creating a Windows 7 USB Install Drive with official Microsoft Tool

Though the demographic is likely small there are certainly a group of Media Center enthusiasts who have already started using a more centralized server setup to store movie media removing the need for a DVD drive on their actual Media Center machine. This goes for many main stream desktop machines as well, with the ability to buy practically any [...]

Bringing a Recording Schedule from Vista to Windows 7

Bringing a Recording Schedule from Vista to Windows 7

Are you one of the many Media Center users already running a Vista Media Center and planning to upgrade to a new Windows 7 install? If so, it’s likely that you’d want to move your recording schedule over as well. For those planning to do a simple upgrade the process should be automatic, however, if you’re planning a clean [...]

Reprogramming MCE Remote Buttons with Intelliremote

Reprogramming MCE Remote Buttons with Intelliremote

We’ve already covered replacing the built in movie library with a third party plug-in like MediaBrowser or Open Media Library. There are even a handful of solutions to hide the default movie start strip and add our own, such as MC Studio and Mikinhosoft’s Hide Strips program. The one problem that has persisted, however, is that pressing the video [...]

Making USB Windows Install Disk Creation Even Easier

Making USB Windows Install Disk Creation Even Easier

Around here we love when someone comes along and creates an application to take even the simplest processes and refines them into an even easier single solution. Previously we covered creating your own bootable USB Windows 7 installation manually and today we’ve got a couple of applications that make the entire process a snap. Even better, both applications are [...]

Tweaking Background Services on a Dedicated Windows 7 Media Center

Tweaking Background Services on a Dedicated Windows 7 Media Center

A default installation of Windows 7 already has incredible performance, capable of running on even the lowest end hardware. That doesn’t mean we aren’t able to eek out just a little more performance from a dedicated Windows 7 Media Center machine though. Windows comes ready to perform a wide range of functions but a dedicated machine really only performs [...]

Getting Started with Windows 7 Media Center for First Timers

Getting Started with Windows 7 Media Center for First Timers

Just getting started with Windows 7 Media Center and not sure where to start? Well, you’ve already found Hack7MC which is a good start! Windows 7 Media Center is a popular solution for beginning home theater PC users due to it’s simplicity out of the box. This means that to get started you really only need the hardware and [...]

Setting Up Tuner Priority per Channel

Setting Up Tuner Priority per Channel

Last week we covered tracking down tuner problems using recording history, this week lets go over a possible fix to the problem. Let’s take a look at changing the tuner priority for specific channels. If you are having trouble with a specific tuner creating bad recordings on a certain channel you may want to try using a different tuner [...]

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