As most regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of Windows 7 Media Center. Previously I’d only used my media centers to watch downloaded tv shows, listen to music and to view photos but I’ve recently moved to Sky after 11 years with Telewest/Virgin Media and after lots and lots of tweaking and testing I now have access to all of my sky channels, including the HD and encrypted channels to DVBLink which acts as a TV server and allows me to share the TV cards installed in my Windows Home Server, both in and out of the home.
In a future post I will explain how I setup DVBlink on my Windows Home Server and on my Windows 7 Media Centers, but I wanted to share some of the other tweaks I’ve made to my media centers. One of the simpliest, but most effective Windows 7 Media Center tweaks I’ve made is to increase the number of channels shown in the EPG. By default, Windows Media Center only displays EPG listings for 7 channels, but this can be increased to 10 channels via a very simple tweak.
To Increase the number of channels in Windows 7 Media Center’s EPG:
- Close Windows Media Center
- Install the Take Ownership registry file
- Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:Windowsehome and find Microsoft.MediaCenter.Shell.dll, Right-click on the file and click ‘Take Ownership’
- Copy Microsoft.MediaCenter.Shell.dll to a temp directory and put this patch in the same directory
- Run the patch (you may need to take ownership of the Microsoft.MediaCenter.Shell.dll in the temp directory)
- copy the new version of Microsoft.MediaCenter.Shell.dll created by the patch to C:Windowsehome
You now should have extra rows displaying in W7MC.
Source: hack7mc
