The Bloog

The traditional way to schedule a recording in Media Center is to go to the guide, locate the program you want to record, hit enter or OK on the remote control to see the program details and hit the Record or Record Series button to schedule it for recording. Then, you have to press back to return to the guide or Live TV.

These steps, while not too many or complex, can be skipped by using some useful shortcuts. While browsing the guide, you can hit Ctrl+R on the keyboard to tag the select program for recording. Pressing Ctrl+R a second time will schedule recording of the entire series. To cancel recording alltogether, press Ctrl+R a third time.

Alternatively, while browsing the guide, just hit the record button on the remote control to schedule recording of the selected program (instead of Ctrl+R on the keyboard). Press the record button again to schedule the entire series, and a third time to cancel the recording.

Now go practice it.

Came over today an interesting article about how to fix a little annoyance in Vista Media Center. The new mini-guide that pops up when you press the up and down arrows on the remote control works, many would argue, unintuitively: arrow up takes you one channel down.

This article shows a simple registry “hack” that changes the functionality by moving to the up channel when pressing the up arrow… thus fixing the problem.

Here are the steps:

1. Click on the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Accessories
2. Right-click on Command Prompt and choose Run as administrator
3. Click Allow to launch an administrator command prompt
4. Run reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings” /v ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Now, if you are like i was, when i first read the steps… puzzled, that is, by the gibberish in the step 4 above, read on for the translation.

Step 4 above simply modifies an existing registry value by changing its value from 0 to 1. It does so via the command line, using the “reg add” command. This command is built-in and you can find more information by typing “reg add /?”. Here’s a breakdown of the parameters:

/v – value, under the selected key. In this case, the ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp under the “…/Settings/VideoSettings” key.
/t – type of the value; here being a REG_DWORD type.
/d – the data to be assigned to the value.
/f – A parameter that simply forces overwriting if the value exists (which it does).

Evidently, you don’t have to do this via the command line if you don’t want to. You can also simply do the following:

1. Fire up regedit via Windows Key+R (to bring up the Run… window)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings
3. Double click the ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp value
4. Change the value to 1 and click OK. (leave it as hexadecimal)

To reverse the “hack” and make the mini-guide function as it used to by default, repeat the steps above but instead set ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp to a value of 0 (zero).

You will have to restart Media Center for the change to take effect. Enjoy.

NOTE: You may actually want to go back to the default way after applying this fix. While this somehow fixes an annoyance, it does create another. The slide-in effect that you see when moving from one channel to another (in the mini-guide), slides channels in contrary to what you would expect. I suppose this is why they made it work wrong in the first place and allowed for it to be changed (easily) via the registry; to compensate for the unintuitive slide in/out effect.

More precisely, when pressing arrow up, after applying the fix, the next/higher channel slides in from below… rather than from above. Instead it should slide in from above, as if going up and down a list which has entries arranged in a decreasing order (higher values higher, lower values lower). Try it and you’ll see…

Now if that could also be fixed, then I’d be a really happy camper.

(Had I been a Program Manager at Microsoft, this never would have happened )