Thursday, May 10, 2007

MCE tip #3: Filter "More Programs" items

I had a need to hide some items under "More Programs" menu in Vista Media Center app.
Unfortunately there appeared to be no way to create a real filter that would help me to apply some "programmatic" criteria to such area of MCE. However, I just found the simplest way to hide items there. All you need to do is to remove the entry points (application registered in MCE) from the following key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Entry Points]

For instance, I knews that the following registry key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Entry Points\{115EADF1-41C4-471b-8FE5-7A52B91BFE75}]
is the entrypoint for Chess Game item of the "More Programs" menu. It is easy to prove if you look under the key and find the "Run" value there. It points to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Games\Chess\ChessMCE.lnk shortcut which is obviously responsible for launching the Chess Game.
All I had to do to hide the Chess is to remove the entrypoint registry key.

The main reason I wanted to hide the game items (or any other registered program items) is that some of them still don't comply to the 10 foot UI requirements. Some games are totally 2' UI based and require mouse and keyboard - not sure who decided to put those in the MCE which is supposed to target TV users as well (and hopefully soon will not target PC users!).

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