E4#

Yesterday E4 on UK digital terrestrial changed from being a premium channel under TopUp TV to being a part of Freeview. Which is going to be fantastic once Big Brother is over J It did however cause a problem for Media Center. When Media Center does a digital channel scan it can tell what kind of service each channel is, some instantly get blocked when they are identified as unsupported services (i.e. Radio). Others don’t always line up correctly, so Media Center has a kind of ‘Block These’ list tucked away in the registry which will knock out BBCi, BBC Parliament, Bloomberg and E4. And this is where the issue is, although E4 is now free it is still on the hard coded blacklist.

 

To remove E4 from the list
1. Go to Start -> Run and type in regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MediaCenter\Service\GLID
3. Double click on ‘ExclusionList’ in the right divide.
4. Delete the E4 line entirely but leave the other 3 channel names in place, these channels make use of technologies unsupported by Media Center.
5. Reboot the Media Center PC.
6. Start Media Center and go to Settings > TV > 'Scan for more services' to perform a channel scan.


If you do not want to edit the registry manually to do this you can use the attached e4.reg to make those changes.

e4.reg (.66 KB)

 
If this is done on a system which has not yet run 'Set Up TV Signal' or is running the release version of Media Center 2005 the above 6 steps should allow Media Center to see E4 when a scan is performed. Sometimes this may not be the case, particularly on systems which have had Media Center 2005 rollup 1 (KB873369) or later installed and where 'Set Up TV Signal' has already been run.
 
If ‘Scan for more services’ fails to detect E4
1. Go to Settings > TV > ‘Set Up TV Signal’. Use this wizard to configure your TV type and guide again. When a service scan is made during this wizard E4 should be detected if no restriction exists in the registry and you have a strong enough signal from your local transmitter.
2. If you have previously setup manual guide associations for channels you may need to make these again through Settings > TV > Guide > Add Listings to Channel. You should also verify that your upcoming recording schedule is correct after making these changes.

Updated: 13/06/2005

28-05-2005 12:08:43 UTC #     |  Trackback

 

Setting time limits on Media Center Extenders#

One of the good things in terms of fiddling about with the Extenders is that they use Windows user accounts to run each devices session under (MCX1-5 for each device). This has been useful as it allows you to use logon scripts to allow the extenders session access to network resources.

 

 

 

This also means that you can set allowed time Windows unique to each extender using the the ‘net user’ command as you can for any other account. You can see the details on the syntax of this on my XP site at http://mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/userhours.php

 

If someone tries to start up an extender which has had its logon hours limited, they won’t actually be told they’ve been blocked. A more generic, ‘There was a problem contacting the Media Center PC’ message will appear.

 

Unfortunately net accounts /forcelogoff does not appear to be effective against an extender session, so forcing the session to end when the time expires isn’t that simple. A very dirty method of kicking off your extenders would be to setup a time limit, copy the following into a .cmd file and setup a scheduled task event to run the cmd file at the time you want.

 

tsdiscon 1 /v

tsdiscon 2 /v

tsdiscon 3 /v

tsdiscon 4 /v

tsdiscon 5 /v

tsdiscon 6 /v

 

However doing blanket in the dark disconnects, isn’t a particularly good idea if you have more than one extender. This makes no distinction between Extenders, or PC remote desktop sessions. If the session is holding the lucky number, it gets booted. If you want to be a little more precise over what you disconnect, the console command ‘Qwinsta’ allows you to see all sessions active on the local machine. You could match the Extender username to a session ID and disconnect it by typing in tsdiscon x /v (where x is the session id), but that would have to be done manually since things can move around depending on what’s going on.

18-05-2005 22:21:30 UTC #     |  Trackback

 

All content © 2008, Mark Salloway