Hacking Windows7 MediaCenter

The ability to backup and restore your recording schedule and guide listings in Media Center is something that will be necessary at some point for almost anyone. Unfortunately, up to this point Media Center doesn’t make it easy for the end user. On the bright side it isn’t very complicated either, you just need to know where to look.

Back ‘Em Up!

To begin with, Media Center creates backup files every time you schedule a new show or make modifications to the guide listings, you just need to find them. To get to the files you will need to enable the viewing of hidden folders, then open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome (by default). Inside you will find a folder, or series of folders, for each tuner you have installed marked “mcepgX-X-X”. Inside each of these folders you will find a backup folder containing backup files for listings, recordings, and subscriptions.

For each type of backup there will be a number of files inside named with a timestamp. The timestamp format is as follows:" “year month day – hour minutes seconds”. This makes it very simple to locate your most recent files. Luckily the files aren’t large at all however and you could easily backup the whole lot in most cases. For restoring the recording schedule only the latest file in recordings is needed.

Put ‘Em Back!

Once you’ve completed your reinstall of Windows 7, open Media Center and run through the setup as usual. Assuming no hardware changes or driver changes between reinstalls we should be set to continue. Retrieve your backup recordings file and copy it to your hard disk.

The file doesn’t need to be anywhere specific but placing it in the backups folder in your new “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\mcepgx-x-x\” directory is probably a best practice. Now we will need to tell Media Center we’d like to load the information from the file. This is done through a program included in Windows 7 called “loadmxf” located in the “\Windows\ehome\” directory.

You can either open a command prompt by typing “cmd” into the start menu box or create a shortcut with the following text: “C:\Windows\ehome\loadmxf.exe –i FILELOCATION”. Replace the FILELOCATION with the location of the file to be loaded.

If using a shortcut, double-click to execute the command before continuing. Otherwise the recording schedule should be loaded into Media Center now. Loading lineup and subscription data from previous installs breaks things currently, so don’t do it!

Load ‘Em Up!

Once you’ve loaded the files back into Media Center you can see that your shows will be listed under series’ in Recorded TV’s Scheduled Recordings but no shows will be scheduled yet. Before we can load these you should be sure to have your channel lineup completed in the Media Center TV Guide. To get the proper times for each scheduled show you will need to reload Guide data.

To do this go to “Tasks > TV > Guide > Get Latest Guide Listings” and wait for the guide data to finish downloading. Then re-check your scheduled shows in Recorded TV. You should now see shows listed on the schedule to be recorded.

Congratulations. You have successfully backed up and restored your scheduled recordings.

Rawhide!

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Written by MHealy | 5 comments

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Tagged As: featured, listing, settings, tv guide, windows 7

This tweak actually comes by way of MCEWorld. Sometimes you want the ability to tweak your skip interval settings, after all the average commercial break lasts about 2 minutes not 30 seconds. Maybe you’re obsessed with never overshooting your target and want to fine tune the length to something smaller. Perhaps you want the ability to rewind your half hour show to the beginning with just the touch of a button (probably a bad idea). Whatever the reason to tweak is fairly simple to employ.

First step is to open RegEdit, Window’s built-in registry editor, in administrator mode. To do this open your start menu and type “regedit” into the search box then press “ctrl+shift+enter.”

Once you’ve got the program open navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings”.

To change the Skip Forward interval located the “SkipAheadInterval”. Double-click to open the dialog to modify the setting and select the “Decimal” option under “Base.” Change the value to whatever time you want.  The time is measured in milliseconds, default is 29000 or 29 seconds.

To change the Skip Backward interval locate the “InstantReplayInterval” and follow the same steps as above. The default for this setting is 7000 or 7 seconds.

Once you’ve finished setting the values to your desired amounts simply close the RegEdit program and restart your Media Center. That’s all there is to it!

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Tagged As: install, listing, settings, 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!

Written by MHealy | 2 comments

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