Windows Media Center – Service Alert

This doesn’t affect me due to my locale, but my Vista Media Center machine just came up with a Service Alert icon, which gives you information about the digital TV switch over in the US.

There is a Microsoft KB Article here with more information. Below are the screen shots from the Service Alert being displayed inside Media Center. The Green Button gets a mention on the last page as well!

Click the images to enlarge.

Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse”, media center”, story”, service alert”

New wiki guide for Transcode 360

It seems there is still allot of confusion over Transcode 360 and how to get it setup properly, I've decided to write a new updated Wiki guide as some things have changed now since the last one here.

This new guide covers updating the mencoder.exe and ffmpeg.exe files, tweaking the MEncoderTranscoder.cs file to enable multi-thread decoding.

I also look at using Transcode 360 with Media Browser this time and talk more about local vs network setups with WHS.

Hopefully users can follow this guide and get transcode 360 working. The guide is based on a 32bit Vista Media Center setup, I've not tried this on Windows 7 lately but things should work pretty much the same way.

Use at your own risk and make sure you have a full backup of your system before you start.

You can see the new wiki guide here it's in PDF so you need Adobe Reader.

Download mirror here

Turn your MCE remote in to a mouse & keyboard

UPDATE:

RemoteKC has been updated to now work properly on Windows 7, by a user called fbird17 on The Green Button forums.

I've not tested it yet but I assume it's working.

You can download the new .exe and .ahk files from these links.

I just had to highlight this little application it's fantastic!

It's been around for awhile I think but I've only just discovered it, it's called RemoteKC

RemoteKC allows you to use your Windows Media Center Edition remote control as a mouse and keyboard.

I am mainly interested in this for the mouse functionality. Having TunerFree MCE in mind when those auto mouse clicks don't work and those parental guidance pop-ups appear, you have no option but to get up and get out the mouse in order to click.

Now with RemoteKC, I don't have to leave the sofa. The mouse is basic, up down left right but enough to click on a prompt you can't otherwise click on with the remote control in normal operation.

I've only tested this on Vista Media Center, looks like it was written for MCE 2005. I've not tried it yet on 7MC.

You can download RemoteKC here