Hacking Windows7 MediaCenter

Don’t stop there check out these 10 other ways to customize your media center!

Many of us are used to being able to see a channel’s logo instead of just a boring old name in our TV listings from our DVRs and Media Centers but it is also one of those features lacking natively in 7MC. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of Makryger of The Green Button, there’s a solution to this quandary.

Presenting, My Channel Logos for 7MC, a program that comes bundled with a number of TV channel logos and a simple program to assign them to any channel in your listing. You can even add your own logos through the program’s easy to use interface.

You can download this wonderful little app from the My Channel Logos website right here. At present there is a bug that did not allow the program to run on a freshly installed Windows 7 Media Center machine with no tuner setup but it did run perfectly on the pre-setup machine. If you have trouble getting the program to run on your machine check out the support thread here. Once you get into the program it’s hard to go wrong.

On your first run the readme file instructs that you must first choose a region and press the “Update” button. Once that’s been done you can let the program Auto Populate Logos, which worked very well assigning all but the most cryptically named channels the proper logo. You can also assign your own channel logos by selecting your desired channel on the left hand side and clicking the black box to the left.

It really could not be simpler. The interface is practically self explanatory. To clear logos from your channels you can select them one by one and press “Clear logo” or clear them all by pressing “Remove All”. Once your logos have been assigned just close the program and restart Media Center.

So download your copy of My Channel Logos and get started on making your dull TV listings shine in no time. For more TV listings help you can also check out our guide on Adding ClearQAM channels to your Media Center.

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Written by MHealy | 6 comments

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Tagged As: edit channel, featured, plugins, programs, tv guide

Peter Near's blog has a post on adding ATSC support to your Media Center box:

First, some background. Like the United States, Canada has decided to transition all television broadcasts from analog to digital. These new digital signals have greater effective range, provide a crystal-clear high definition picture, and as with all over the air network TV broadcasts are free and legal to access. It's worth noting that over the air signals represent the best high-definition picture quality you can get for network television - better than cable and much better than satellite. While high definition is available for a fee via cable and satellite, those high definition channels are subject to ever-increasing compression and picture quality degradation as they try to squeeze more and more content into your subscription. And unlike cable and satellite, over the air broadcasts are not encrypted and can be easily incorporated into a Media Center setup, copied over to your iPod, and are generally easy to use. The United States has nearly completed their digital transition, and will be shutting down the analog broadcasts in February 2009. Canada is well into its transition, with most major markets now broadcasting in digital and 100% of the country switching over to digital by 2011 before we shut down our analog transmitters. Here in Toronto, I can get access to every major US and Canadian network in full high-definition glory using a $40 antenna that I put in my attic.

You can find the rest of the post where you'll be taken through adding ATSC to 7MC using a SiliconDust HDHomerun (a popular clearQAM and ATSC tuner) over on his blog at The Green Button.

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Tagged As: atsc, clearqam, edit channel, listing, tv guide

Adding ClearQAM channels to your Windows7 Media Center can be quite a daunting process. With reguard to previous version of Media Center though it's still quite an improvement as before there was no native support for ClearQAM whatsoever. ClearQAM is generally broadcast in the United States through your cable provider and typically only consisits of the basic broadcast channels you would be able to get through an antenna. The advantage to these channels over regular cable is they come in as HD channels for free.

The first step is to check your tuner manufacturer's website for the most recent drivers for your particular tuner card. If there are newer drivers you may want to install these before going on. The next step is to run a normal TV Tuner setup in Media Center. If you have already run the initial setup you can run the tuner setup again by going to Tasks > Settings > TV > Setup TV Signal. Follow this wizard and be sure you have an available ClearQAM tuner presented during the setup and follow through the TV Channel Scan.

Note: Certain older Hauppauge cards may need a registry fix which can be found here at Mike Wren’s blog.

Often this scan returns "0 channels found", fear not. Once you have completed the wizard, you will most likely need to add these channels to your TV listings manually. Go to Tasks > Settings > TV > Guide > Edit Channels. Here you will be presented with what is most likely a lengthy list of channels with your basic cable channels numbers and labeled. Just past these neatly organized channels, though, you will find a mess of channels marked simply with numbers and displaying (or not) a small lock beside them. This is the cash crop, these are ClearQam channels.

Once we have come to this point enable the "Show Preview" option on the left and scroll down through the ClearQAM channels until you come to one or more that do not show the lock icon beside them. You can also reffer to SiliconDust's webpage to identify ClearQAM channels you will likely recieve in your area. Selecting the channel name on the right with "Show Preview" enabled should bring up the channel in the background and play audio from the channel. If you don't see/hear this it may be a false positive and you should move on until you find one that comes in correctly.

When you reach a ClearQAM channel that comes in properly mark the checkbox next to the channel number to enable this channel in your TV guide listing. Once you've completed marking all the channels that come in save your settings on the left then we'll move on to setting up the channels in the guide.

Enter your TV guide listing from the main menu and scroll until you come to the channels you just added to your guide listing. You'll notice that none of these channels have names or program data associated with them. To change this click on the channel number on the left and then select "Edit Channel".

Here you can once again refer to your local ClearQAM listing through Silicon Dust's site if the channel numbers match that listing you can simply watch the channels momentarily to determine which channel you are viewing. Then you have the option of Renaming the channel and Editing Listings associated with the channel. Note that when possible you should choose the listing associated with a "DT", "DT2", etc after the callsign as these will give you the listings for the digital channel and include any HD information that is available.

That's it, you should now be able to enjoy your ClearQAM channels from inside Windows 7 Media Center!

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Tagged As: clearqam, edit channel, featured, listing, tv guide