Xbox 360 MCE Tips

When registering an application for use with an MCE Extender and using the %windir%\ehome\RegisterMCEApp.exe, make sure you use the /allusers switch. If you do not use this switch, it will only work for highly priveleged accounts.  The MCE Extender runs in the context of a less secure account, and thus will not see the add-in if you do not register with /allusers.  For more information about what you can and cannot do with an MCE Extender, see the following MSDN article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/MedctrSDK/htm/handlingthelimitedaccessrightsofamediacenterextend.asp

Also, thanks goes out to Michael Creasy (MSFT) for his help.

A quick summary: the MCE rights are limited by default read/write:

- Only to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE
- Only locations on disk that explicitly have read/write permissions defined for Media Extender Users local group. By default, this is the Shared Documents folder.

Beyond that, I haven't really found limitations with the applications that can run on an extender.  I was able to successfuly get the xbox 360 to display my custom HTML application that uses ASP.NET web services, and type in to them with the Media Center remote (did not try the Xbox 360 remote yet).  I am going to be playing with AJAX / ATLAS and will also give that a whirl (not sure if this will make it into the code camp demo or not).

Published Mon, Jan 9 2006 16:19 by greghuber

Comments

# re: Xbox 360 MCE Tips

To be clear, if you don't use the /allusers switch the registration will only be for the current user - a limited user could use RegisterMCEApp.exe to register something for themselves, but not for anyone else.

Monday, January 09, 2006 11:16 AM by Michael Creasy

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