Media Center Studio is a program that helps you give Microsoft’s Windows Media Center a complete makeover in order to freshen up on those visuals. The app simply lets you load a different theme or create one of your own. Moreover, it gives the possibility to move the position of menu elements as well as rename them.
There is no denial that Microsoft did a great job with Windows 7 Media Center. But as good as the application is, Microsoft still left a door opened for third party developers to produce visual modifications. Media Center Studio comes into scene for this particular matter.
You won’t have any trouble during installation because of the
ClickOnce deployment technology which also allows for automatic updates, thus enabling you to enjoy the latest release of the application as soon as the developer releases it.
The ribbon daubed interface is easy to handle as the three menus you can tinker with are not crowded with too many options. These allow you to paint a new look to Windows Media Center either by applying an already compiled theme or by starting to make modifications to the original images on your own.
Under “Start Menu” section the application puts at your disposal the possibility to customize the menus and their items of the Media Center through moving them to a different slot. Additionally, you can give them new names.
Media Center Studio gives you access to all the images composing the interface of Windows Media Center and lets you modify them with your own set. However, we found this to be a task for the professionals who deal with imagery on a more frequent basis as multiple layers have to be combined for the outcome to be spectacular.
Getting ready-to-apply Windows Media Center themes is not a tough deal. A simple search in Google will return some pretty cool results. However, we expected a large number to pick from. As soon as you import them they’re ready to be applied. The entire process should not take more than a minute.
The application can also act as Windows Media Center launcher in order to view the results as soon as possible. For those looking for a way to return to the default looks of the media center, MCStudio, though in beta stage of development does not disappoint and provides a button to restore the looks and configuration to their default settings.
Media Center Studio allows you full customization of the visual elements in Microsoft’s program. Besides images for backgrounds and thumbnails, these also include fonts and colors. However, in the case of fonts the beta stage of the software only allows modifying their size.
As far as the Start Menu of Windows Media Center is concerned, the options the possibilities are quite limited compared to what themes section offers. The flexibility is restricted to renaming the available items and moving them to different menus.
Thus you can shift items in the Music menu to Pictures and Videos. Or you can reorganize the menus so that they become easier to access.
What MCStudio can do more for you is to allow integration of different other applications or games into the menu of Windows Media Center. Among the options of the Start menu section there is the means to create a shortcut for an application or game into the “extras library”.
The entire procedure is a cinch to complete and requires you to punch in the path to the application you want to insert, its name, launch arguments (if necessary), an active image as well as define the buttons that should trigger it to close or terminate.
To make things even more appealing, the customization degree extends to the possibility of defining an action to be taken the moment the application is launched, like muting currently playing media or starting to play a user-defined song or video.
In the case of games things are pretty much the same, with the only restriction that you can choose only from the set of executable files present in Games folder. But this does not stop you from editing the path field yourself and add the game you want.
During our testing we faced a few crashes, but Media Center Studio worked most of the times. We found it quite confusing to handle at times as moving through the tabs was not enough to access the necessary options and a change of menus was often in order. Also, we were not able to add applications or games any place else but the “extras library” section.
The Good It allows you to add your own images to customize Windows Media Center or apply ready-made themes. You can export a changed theme.
Reverting to the default configuration of Windows Media Center is a click away in the “Home” menu. MCStudio lets you enrich the “Extras” menu with applications and games of your own as well as assign specific behavior when these are launched.
The Bad As it is a work in progress bugs are still being discovered and fixes are being developed.
The Truth MCStudio looks good and offers you the possibility to visually customize the way Windows Media Center as well as enrich it with applications and games of your own. During our testing it proved pretty stable although we did face some crashes.
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