Summary: Stephen Toub discusses writing background add-ins for Windows XP Media Center 2005, and demonstrates how to write an add-in that allows a user to enter a time code on the remote control, causing Media Center to jump to that location in the current media playback. (41 printed pages)
Remote controls are a wonderful thing. They let us manipulate from afar and are any couch potato's best friends. Of course, a remote control is only as useful as its programming, and often that programming is limited by the device's creator or by the target software's manufacturer.
On the surface, this would seem to be the case with Windows XP Media Center 2005. Media Center has been programmed by its development team to respond to certain commands from the remote control, and depending on the current media experience within Media Center, that behavior changes. For example, when watching live TV, pressing digits on the remote control forces a channel change. Yet pressing those same number buttons when searching the electronic program guide allows the user to search for shows that contain certain characters and phrases. But what if you needed these buttons to behave differently? How else might you want Media Center to respond?
Personally, I think Media Center is a terrific system, but no system is perfect. After all, with millions of users, it's impossible to design a system that is perfection in the eyes of all of its users, as what's an ideal feature for one user is another user's frustration. In my case, I've been frustrated by the lack of a slider bar that allows me to jump to arbitrary positions in a recorded DVR-MS show. If I watch a recorded show in Windows Media Player, I'm able to use the mouse to jump to any location in the video I desire, simply by clicking on a particular location on the slider bar at the bottom of the video (see Figure 1).
Media Center 2005 has no such capability. Short of fast-forwarding, rewinding, skipping forward a registry-defined amount of time, or skipping backwards a registry-defined amount of time, there's no easy way to jump to a particular location in a show. Similarly, when playing music, there's no way to jump to a particular location within the audio. As a developer, when I find a perceived gap in a product's functionality, my first inclination is to ask whether I can write any code to fix it. Wouldn't it be great if I could program Media Center to respond to remote control commands in a fashion that would allow a user to jump around within a video, say by allowing the user to enter a time code on the remote's number buttons, thereby causing Media Center to jump to that location in the playback?
In fact, this is possible.
If you must have this functionality, read the full article
here
Re: Time Travel with Media Center
