Windows 7: Articles

Since installing Windows 7, I’ve become hooked on Windows Media Center. It’s become my app of choice for watching streaming videos from Netflix. But what WMC offers in functionality, it lacks in user interface.

The blue background becomes monotonous after prolonged use. There are few options for re-ordering items to the WMC tab strips, or for entering your own custom items.

Enter a small application for Windows Vista and Windows 7, Media Center Studio, which attempts to provide the configuration controls that WMC should have had in the first place.

Studio supports installing Media Center Themes that overhaul every aspect of WMC’s appearance.

Let’s say you wanted to change the WMC background, for example. On the Home tab, click the New button, which will create a new theme. Select Images -> Common -> Background, and change the two values COMMON.ANIMATED.BACKGROUND.PNG and COMMON.BACKGROUND.PNG to a wallpaper-sized photo or illustration. (Tip: despite the name of these properties, you can set these backgrounds to either a PNG or a JPEG file.)

Close the theme window to save the theme. Select your new theme on the Themes tab, and click Apply on the Themes menu. The next time you open Windows Media Center, you’ll see your background.

If you don’t want to create your own themes, you can import theme packages uploaded to sites such as Hack Windows 7 Media Center. Download a .mct file, such as the Midnight Magic theme, then apply it to Windows Media Center using the Import Theme option in Media Studio Center.

Unfortunately, the feature I was most excited to use in Media Center Studio doesn’t appear to function well on Windows 7. The Start Menu tab provides functionality for configuring WMC tab strips. You can hide individual items in tab strips, or hide entire tab strips altogether. You can even add custom items, including your own videos and favorite applications, as new tab strip items.

When I attempted to use this, I was only able to hide a few selected menu items. None of the items on the Movies or TV tab strips will hide in WMC when you uncheck them in Media Center Studio. Attempts to hide the Sports and Extras tab strips also met with failure.

Media Center Studio is also supposed to mark the currently selected item in the tab strip as the default item in WMC; this doesn’t appear to work on 7, either.

Despite these drawbacks, Media Center Studio goes a long way toward making the Media Center experience even more fun and enjoyable on Windows 7.

Hopefully, either the developer will iron out the kinks in Windows 7, or Microsoft will incorporate some of this functionality into its next major Media Center release.