Hacking Windows 7 Media Center

Media Center Studio Installation

by @ 11:59 am on November 10th, 2011 in programs, themes with 11 Comments

As many have likely noticed the Media Center Studio site has been down for quite some time and doesn’t look likely to make a reappearance. Due to the web-based application installation procedure used by MCS this puts us in a particularly hard position as there isn’t a simple installer to redistribute. A few guys (Josh3693, JoshFink and Assassin) at the AVS forums have set forth to provide us with a solution to the problem. It’s actually relatively simple but will still require you to go digging around in hidden folders so not for the absolute novice.

mcs

First you’ll need a copy of the files which are mirrored here to spare Assassin the bandwidth but don’t hesitate to visit his blog here. The installation instructions follow:

Assassin’s Instruction for Media Center Studio work around…

1. Download the zipped folder directory “Assassin’s MCS Directory”

2. Unzip the file

3. Make sure you have “show hidden folders” enabled under the folders option in your Start -> Control Panel menu.

4. Move the unzipped directory to C:\users\*your_user_name*\Appdata\local\Apps\2.0\*huge_string_of_junk*\ where “*huge_string_of_junk*” is the name of the directory that you just unzipped and pasted into that folder.

5. Then run the executable : Media Center Studio.exe

A text copy is also available here.

That should be all there is to getting Media Center Studio running as long as the official site stays dark. Should anyone have contact with the owner of adventmediacenter.com we’d love to see the site come back or would gladly host the files here at Hack7MC to make them available to the community.

It may also be worth note at this time that there is another media center theme application available here at Patchou’s Cabana. There aren’t very many themes available for the program currently however, though that may change with the outage of the official Media Center Studio site. Hopefully Assassin’s method to installation eases that pain for now.

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