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Windows Media Center resources

Work in progress

This page documents features and add-ins for Windows Media Center, which are nowadays quite hard to find, as the sites are for the most part long gone.

Note that, at present, the information posted here relates just to XP Media Center Edition 2005.

Information

Better UI for movies

The default interface for playing back video files in XP MCE is... lackluster, at best, essentially being just a remote-friendly file browser. To be fair, it was really just meant to play back home movies (from a DV camcorder, for example); while it can be used to play back any video file, for actual movies... it's very basic; My Movies is a plugin meant to solve this issue.

Version 1.56 is the best one to use, for now - the latest one supporting XP is still available from the My Movies website, but it requires a mandatory (!) free account - and obviously the servers are dead by now - and won't let you continue without it.

This offers a much nicer UI for movie playback, with support to add a cover art, description, release year, rating, etc. Adding movies is done using the "Manage Library" program outside of Media Center.
In theory ripping DVDs is possible, however it tries (and fails) to connect to servers to obtain the movie info, and there's no way to bypass that and enter the information manually.

LCD status indicator

Use FrontView 2.03, available below. Version 3 also works, and has a better UI, however it's a trial version which has limitations after the initial 30-day period, while that's not the case for 2.03.

Various types of displays are supported: parallel is, theoretically, the easiest to get going, with just a DB25 connector and a hobbyist character display (most standard sizes are supported). This can then be installed in a project box or on the front panel of a PC. [Wiring Diagram] [Example Image]

USB and Serial displays are also supported; it should be possible to connect a 16x2 or 20x4 LCD this way using Adafruit's "USB + Serial Backpack", though I haven't been able to test this.

Downloads