Theme lovers love to customize everything and now its the turn for Windows Media Center lovers who would love to add their own image, change the start menu icon, the splash screen etc of the Windows Media Center which is also one of the most common tools to watch TV on Windows Machine and used with Home Server to stream music and videos.
Coming back to Themes and Customization, Media Center Studio is one tool which lets you customize Windows Media Center. Lets see what you can do with it :
- Replace Images used inside the WMC like Start menu, Icons with yours. It gives you access to each and every image available.
- Create Themes like we have themes for Windows 7. You can change Colors, Fonts and Images.
- This tool has separate dedicated section to customizing the start menus like renaming Picture Library, Music Library, Items in Extars, Tv Archive, favorites etc.
- Create your own menu strip with
- Create Packaged themes which can be used on another computer or you can share with your friends by using Export and Import Themes Option
Create Strip Menu and Add your program inside Windows Media Center
Creating another menu is bit dicy. So lets talk about it. Since this app is still in beta expect that Media Center will crash sometimes and you might have to start over again.
- To start creating a strip menu first select Start Menu option. Now click on the First Option which says Menu Strip. This will not give you any popup but to find where the menu strip was added, scroll down to the last section of Start menu. Should be just below Tasks.
- Now click on the edit icon to give it a name. You can click on the up and down arrow buttons on the side of the name to move it up or down.
- Now lets add a new item inside this menu. Click on Application or there is another option which lets you add games like . Here you select icons, additional parameters and type of resources required like audio, video etc. The options here even allow what kind of actions you can take before launching and when you get back to media center once you exit the application. The programs lunched from here run inside the WMC console.
- Adding Entry Point to Windows Media Strip Menu. To add an entry point to Start menu, you will need to open the Entry Point area which is under start menu. This was bit difficult to find on first look.
Once you are done with this. Save the start menu and apply the theme.Remember even if you don’t have a theme you can still change the start menu any time. I wish there was an option to add YouTube video link here so I can watch my subscribed channels here.
Here is a video describing more about it:
Few places where I find the plugin crashes the Media Center is when you leave a new Start Menu Strip empty or when you add a program where settings ar wrong with it for example when you gibe in correct path. Rest works fine.
Download Windows Media Center Studio.
