Microsoft media extender devices




















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You may unsubscribe at any time. To create a comparable experience on the Extender, you may need to program your application to detect the Extender session, and to determine which type of Extender—the Xbox or a third-party device—the user is operating.

This information will enable you to make any necessary adjustments to your application to ensure that the user experience is appropriate for Extender users. These adjustments might include the following:. Capabilities object. On the host PC, IsConsole will always return true. To detect an Extender session in managed code, check the MediaCenterEnvironment. Capabilities property. Deviceinfo object. This property will return the string "Xbox " if the device is an Xbox , and some other string if the device is a third-party Extender.

For media content, all Extenders for Windows Media Center support the following media types through the PlayMedia method. Some third-party Extender devices may support additional media types, but to ensure support on all devices, Windows Media Center extensibility applications should use only the media types listed below. Note The PlayMedia method is the only way to access Windows Media Center's built-in media player, which delivers media content smoothly to the Extender through a dedicated side channel.

Playing video or audio content outside of this method, such as with an embedded ActiveX player, is not supported and probably will not play correctly.

The only additional limitation on the Extender is that non-silent license acquisition, in which the user must navigate to a separate page to acquire the license, is not supported. If you have DRM-protected content, you should work with your license issuer to set up a process to issue your licenses silently. If you create your playlists to include ignored elements, the files specified in your REF elements should still play in order, but you might lose some functionality.

Once you have determined that the user is accessing your application from an Extender, you can programmatically make adjustments to address the issues described in this section. As you review these issues, keep in mind that most developers will want to avoid creating large amounts of separate code to accommodate Extender devices.

Because third-party Extenders have a smaller set of display capabilities than the Xbox or the Windows Media Center PC, the best strategy is to treat the third-party Extender user as your target audience and complete this experience before adding extra features for other platforms. Some applications depend on a setup program such as a download manager, an ActiveX control, or a readme file to install items onto a user's computer.

Users cannot install software from the Extender because installation requires administrative user rights. The CreateDesktopShortcut method is designed to accomplish this transition smoothly. You can call this method from script, passing in the URL for your setup file or ActiveX control installation page as an argument.

Be sure to install the application for All Users so that the user can return to the Extender and access it. For security reasons, the Extender does not allow your application to have any user interface appear outside of Windows Media Center. If your application attempts to invoke a UI element outside of Windows Media Center, the Extender will automatically close the session.

Test carefully to ensure this does not happen. Animations are commonly used in Windows Media Center applications to enrich the user experience and to make the user interface more intuitive to use. Depending on the type of application, animations may need to be adjusted to accommodate the different rendering capabilities of Extender devices. This applies only to animations, not to video content played using Windows Media Center's PlayMedia method.

Supported video files will play correctly on the PC and any Extenders. Most animations in XBAP or hosted HTML applications are rasterized converted from vector images to bitmaps on the PC and sent frame-by-frame as a series of bitmap images to the remote Extender device for display. This process is optimized so that simpler animations involving fewer pixels will be displayed at a suitably high frame rate.

However, larger, more complicated animations will be displayed at a lower frame rate as low as two or three frames per second with less consistency, more dropped frames, and poor audio synching. Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. Hi Adam, Thank you for posting on the forums. Follow the steps in Extender Setup. Hope that helps, please post back and let us know.

How satisfied are you with this reply? Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. This site in other languages x. Furthermore, we strongly recommend against the use of server-side playlists because server-side playlists are not supported on Media Center Extender devices.

Windows Media Center relies on Microsoft DirectShow filters to render audio and video content, and includes a set of default filters that support a wide variety of audio and video formats. If your application's audio or video format is not supported by the default filters, you can add support by installing and registering a custom DirectShow source filter on the Windows Media Center PC, thereby allowing the MediaCenterEnvironment. PlayMedia method to play the media without the need for you to write any additional code.

By adding a custom filter, your application automatically receives the following support from Windows Media Center:. Skip to main content.

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