Posts Categorised: Windows Media Center

0Windows Media Center eHome LogoWindows Media Center on Windows 10

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

With the launch of Win­dows 10 Microsoft has offi­cially killed off Win­dows Media Cen­ter. How­ever, Win­dows Media Cen­ter was found in the early builds of Win­dows 10 and noth­ing fun­da­ment­al to Win­dows 10 is incom­pat­ible with Media Cen­ter. This begs the ques­tion: Can Media Cen­ter be added in to Win­dows 10? The answer: yes!
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0DVB LogicFixed: DVBLink MCE Client first tune fail

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

One of my many HTPC cli­ents has had a strange prob­lem — the first time it is tuned into a chan­nel it fails with the com­mon (and mean­ing­less) Play Ready error. Chan­ging chan­nel once always seems to bring it back to life how­ever. After much dig­ging around I finally found the very straight­for­ward solution
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0DVB LogicFixed: DVBLink media center playready message

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve been using DVBLink to share TV around my home for sev­er­al years. Of all the issues with it, the most dreaded is the “Play Ready” error on Win­dows Media Cen­ter cli­ents. The prob­lem is this error mes­sage is mean­ing­less — it is gen­er­ated by Media Cen­ter, and just means it can­’t get a sig­nal from the tuner. The fail­ure could be any­where behind the scenes. Recently my 2 main cli­ents star­ted throw­ing this error com­pletely out of the blue.
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0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoPlay BluRays and DVD’s in MediaCenter with MPC-HC

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve long run Win­dows Media Cen­ter on my HTPCs in com­bin­a­tion with DVBLink and Medi­aB­rowser. How­ever, recently we have been watch­ing more phys­ic­al disks than in the past, and I have found vari­ous issues with Media Cen­ter. Usu­ally I have MPC-HC con­figured as an extern­al play­er, but doing this for phys­ic­al disks proved less than simple. Even­tu­ally how­ever, I have man­aged to get it work­ing flawlessly.

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1Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoHow to set remote control jump keys for MPC-HC

Posted by & filed under Windows Media Center.

As I’ve doc­u­mented in the past, I have sev­er­al HTPC’s run­ning Win­dows Media Cen­ter. I also use Medi­aB­rowser for TV series and movies ripped from disk. I’ve found that Medi­aB­rowser works much bet­ter with an extern­al play­er than the intern­al play­er — per­form­ance seems to be super­i­or — so I use Media Play­er Clas­sic Home Cinema. I also have sev­er­al Media Cen­ter remote con­trols for use with the vari­ous HTPCs, and one of the most fre­quently used pairs of but­tons are the “jump” or “skip” but­tons which in media cen­ter jump the cur­rent play­back for­ward by 30 seconds or back by 30 seconds. This is really handy for skip­ping adverts in recor­ded TV.  How­ever, under default install­a­tion set­tings these keys don’t work when play­ing videos in MPC-HC.  After much tri­al and error I finally figured out the cor­rect configuration

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0Windows Media Center eHome LogoGet Media Center 8 free

Posted by & filed under Windows Media Center.

If you’ve got Win­dows 8 Pro, and wish to add Media Cen­ter to it you need a key from Microsoft. In future this wont be free, but you can get one free until 31st Jan 2013 thanks to a Microsoft offer.  I have registered for mine, even though I don’t run Win­dows 8 because I may want to use it in future so why not!

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2media center studioMedia Center Studio

Posted by & filed under Windows Media Center.

It seems that the Media Cen­ter Stu­dio site is per­man­ently down. For­tu­nately sev­er­al people have man­aged to archive the files needed to install it, and have provided them, along with some instruc­tions. I have improved upon their manu­al instruc­tions by mak­ing a self-extract­ing installer with short­cut. My ver­sion of the installer can be found on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads page[/intlink]