0Windows Media Center on Windows 10

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!

A dis­cus­sion for­um on MyDigitalLife.info con­tains a wealth of details and most use­fully of all an up-to-date installer. Install­a­tion is straight-for­ward. Run each of 3 com­mand-scripts in order, as Admin­is­trat­or, restart­ing between each. In many cases it is even sim­pler. Using v6 of the installer I have suc­cess­fully installed Media Cen­ter onto my recently upgraded Win­dows 10 Home laptop. I have also tested it with my primary addons: Emby and DVBLink. Both have worked without issue.

Hope­fully by the time Win­dows Media Cen­ter com­pletely dies (with Win­dows 11 maybe?) the altern­at­ives will finally be good enough to switch.

Update: I should have noted above that Win­dows 10 does not include the codecs needed for Liv­eTV. How­ever, Liv­eTV works just fine with the LAV Fil­ters. I already had these installed on my test sys­tem so Liv­eTV worked straight away. Install LAV and dur­ing install­a­tion make sure to tick the .wtv option which isn’t enabled by default