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Remote Potatos original accomplishment, allowing us to view Media Centers EPG remotely and even schedule recordings may have been dwarfed by its newest one. Remote Potato now has the ability to stream recorded TV from your Media Center machine to anywhere with internet access. Theres also been a number of improvements to the guide functions (the original reason we love it). Lets take another look at what used to be just a handy way to schedule recordings while away from the Media Center.

To get started with Remote Potatos newest features well need to download and install the latest version of Remote Potato from FatAttitude. The program will need to be installed on the main Media Center machine only. Remote Potato uses a web-based front end for remote viewing meaning no extra software to install on each machine. Once installed on the Media Center machine access to the front end can be found at http://networkname:9080. This of course is only possible if the proper firewall rules are allowed during setup, which you will be prompted for during installation.

Once installed and running the first thing of note is the revamped start page for Remote Potato. This new look is certainly more stylish and even a little bit entertaining watching the background respond to mouse movements. Those looking for something different can even choose from a few other themes in the Remote Potato server configuration including retro and minimalist. Theres also a blank theme included for those looking to customize for themselves.

The biggest new feature of recent version, however, is the ability to remotely stream Recorded TV to anywhere with access to the internet. Simply press the Recorded TV entry in Remote Potatos menu to bring up a listing of recorded television. Just choose an episode, press play and select a quality. Here of course is where it gets a little sticky.

In normal quality, over a gigabit network, everything was able to stream from the main Media Center machine (no lightweight machine). Unfortunately, normal quality was terrible to actually watch. Content was fairly blocky during action sequences even on HD content.

Likely this was only due to the quality settings chosen when play began, unfortunately, we couldnt get HD content to successfully stream over the local network in any higher quality setting than normal. Hopes were high as it is a gigabit network but the buffer would start to climb then abruptly wonk out displaying random numbers. Also the server would report all clients disconnected in debug modes event viewer.

Standard Definition content was able to be streamed in full quality (Ultra) with considerable success over the local network. There was quite a bit of buffering going on at some points but the show was ultimately watchable in the default view. Under the full screen view, however, there was considerable interlacing visible though when scaling standard definition to 1080p in a web browser this is completely forgivable.

Yet to be tested personally, streaming across the internet is likely to only give worse results with a much more limited available bandwidth to work with. Though the program has spawned an epic thread on The Green Button spanning over 52 pages at this point and the answer may lie somewhere in there to solve our streaming troubles. If you experience any issues the thread appears to be a fantastic place to get technical support for Remote Potato bot from the community and the project owner carlosp_uk.

Browsing around to the older features of the program this is one thing Remote Potato still does extremely well. Remote scheduling of recordings and viewing of the TV guide have become much more stylized and easier to use. New features include loading the EPG data, including channel icons, directly from the Media Center machine as opposed to retrieving them on each client machine.

With new selectors for popular times of the day and the ability to quickly select later dates its almost easier to use than the built-in Media Center TV guide. Shows are now colored coded similar to the option available in Windows 7 Media Center and any icons added by My Channel Logos are loaded automatically.

Search the guide from the main menu as well as managing scheduled recordings and even series schedules, Remote Potato still does all of this very well. Even better its all complete free and open-source, two of our favorite words. Be sure to give Remote Potato a try, its definitely worth the time to install and even seems to run straight out of the box very well. Even if you havent the need for remote scheduling capability its interesting to see whats slowly becoming possible with Windows 7 Media Center.

Looking for a way to launch commands or programs to run in the background from the Extras Library menu? When you may be in luck, CW-Kid and Andrew Cherry have come up with a .dll and a set of direction for doing just that. The process can be a little daunting for novices but if youre looking for a way to run cmd files in the background youre likely able to tackle the task. This can be especially useful for those looking to run mc2xml or that have setup batch files to process WTV to DVR-MS conversion. After following this guide youll have a handy little icon to launch the command from right inside Windows 7 Media Center.

To get started youll need to download the .dll file created by Andrew Cherry and extract it to the C:Windowsehome folder. This will handle the launching of the cmd file in the background. These cmd files are simple text files with the .cmd extension that can be written to do anything you can do from a standard command line interface, also known as a batch file.

Once youve got the .dll file extracted to the ehome directory and a batch file ready to run create a new xml file. Again this is a simple text file which can be created in any notepad application, simply save the file with the .xml extension and its an xml file. Copy the following into the new XML file:

The title text that appears below the icon in Media Center”

Converting audio streams already contained inside an MKV can be a daunting process for the beginner. First, well need to extract the audio tracks from the MKV container then well begin the process of converting the track. Finally, well re-mux the entire project back into a new MKV file. There are any number of reasons why one would want to convert from one audio type to another, compatibility with certain hardware such as Media Center Extenders not being the least of them. For this guide well convert from an incompatible DTS stream to an AC3 stream for Media Center Extender compatibility.

Before we get started well need to download and install a few programs. First, in order to read and thereby convert the DTS stream we need a decoder such as FFDShow installed. Under a default installation FFDShow should be all set to decode a wide variety of audio formats including DTS. Next, we need to download and install MKVToolnix and MKVExtract. Installing MKVToolnix

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Sean Alexander recently posted a good tip for Windows 7 Media Center users which is something that some of you may have overlooked: turning on color-coded program categories in the on-screen guide. With this option, you can easily see at a glance which channels are Sports, which are News, which are Movies, etc., just like what you would see in the guide on your home television. To turn this option on, go into Settings>TV>Guide Page Options, and click the first checkbox option which is “Apply colored backgrounds to shows, based on their category”.

After turning this option on, your channels will be identified with the following colors:

• Green – Sports
• Purple – Movies
• Light Blue – Kids & Family
• Orange – Special
• Yellow – News

While youre in the settings there, you can also set channels to display by name instead of number an especially useful option for identifying which channels are which if you cant remember them by number.