How to move plugins to different MCE Start menus

[syrilion]

After building my media centre and getting it just right, I wanted to tweak it a bit so that the icons for all the programs were in the MCE start menus that I wanted them in. Case in point - using the MusicPlayer plugin to sort out my music - problem is that it is not in the music menu in MCE. Seemed like a pretty obvious thing to change....

After several days of snooping around I finally found a way to move ANY program or plugin link (icon) to any of the existing start menus in mce. Requires a bit of registry editing - but most people reading this will not have a problem with that

1. Locate the GUID in the registry for the program or plugin that you want to move. Usually this will be somewhere in [LOCAL_MACHINE]/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current User/Media Centre/Extensibility/Categories/Start Menu/...

2. When you find the registry entry you need to add a key titled "Category". the Value needs to be a text string of one of the following:

Category = Start Menu Strip
Services\Audio = Music
Services\Movies = TV + Movies*
Services\Pictures = Pictures + Videos
Services\TV = TV + Movies*

* The TV + Movies strip is a special case because there are 2 distinct categories but only a single strip for the tile to appear in. If you register an entry point in the TV category, it takes precedence over any entry point registered in the Movies category and will appear in the TV + Movies strip on the Start menu. If you only have an entry point registered in the Movies category, then it will appear in the TV + Movies strip on the Start menu.

3. Close Regedit and restart the MCE shell, and you will find the icon in the location specified in the "Category" key

This information was gleaned from: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/pages...ows-vista.aspx

Now what would be really cool is if someone could write a program that did this for every day users (I am not a programmer). I would be happy to be a alpha/beta tester!

[dgaust]

Like this plugin?

[syrilion]

Hi dgaust. I'll give it a whirl tonight and let you know - but I reckon it's exactly want I was talking about!!

[Advent]

That's the same article I read before writing that util, syrilion Let me know if it works for you.

[syrilion]

Hi Advent/dgaust, I have tried the app - looks great! It seems that it moves items from the "more programs" section to other sections (which I reckon would have solved my initial problem), but is there any way to view the icons in each strip menu and re-sort them as you see fit?

The other things that would be cool is to be able to set which icon in each strip menu is the default . For example in the TV+ Movies menu 'recorded tv' is the default, where as I would like 'Live TV' to be the default. I know there is a registry setting to do this - default = true, but it would be a great addition to the app.

[Advent]

Unfortunately all MS doesn't allow you to reorganise the menus at will, they only allow you to do what my util does - construct two custom strips from addin programs, and add one addin program to each of TV & Movies, Music and Pictures & Videos.

As for the default thing, I wasn't aware of a registry setting to change the default icon for a strip! Do you have a link that explains in detail?

[syrilion]

Hi Advent - Sorry for getting your hopes up, it appears that I was wrong with the default thing (been reading too much!). The only way that you can change the order of the icons within the strip menus is by TimeStamps. This needs to be done in the registry. Use the format:

"TimeStamp"=dword:0C3919AF (or any hex value to indicate the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight on January 1, 2000 C.E.)

I got this info from http://discuss.mediacentersandbox.co...howThread.aspx and here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb189039.aspx

Dunno where I got the default thing ...

[Advent]

Thanks syrilion - my util already uses the TimeStamp setting to set the order of the icons.