Boxee
I was recently notified that Boxee might benefit from the same hack I used to get XBMC working with my Windows Media Center remote (see the post before this one). The problem was the same. While you can use a Windows Media Center remote and IR receiver (or a universal remote emulating one) to control Boxee, the green button will continue to launch Windows Media Center. I was asked to modify the little launcher I had written for launching XBMC to launch Boxee instead. About 10 seconds of coding (and another 5 minutes of testing) later, I had what appears to be a working solution.
Download BoxeeLauncher (source code and Visual Studio project are included)
Install instructions are the same:
We need to change permissions on the default launcher so we can copy over it:
1. Go to “C:\Windows\ehome”
2. In the “ehome” directory, right click “ehshell.exe” and choose “Properties”
3. Click on the “Security” tab and click on the “Advanced” button at the bottom.
4. Click on the “Owner” tab and click the “Edit” button.
5. Select “Administrators” and hit “OK.”
6. Click “OK” in the “Advanced Security Settings for ehshell.exe” dialog.
7. In the “ehshell.exe Properties” dialog, click on “Administrators” under “Group or user names” and click the “Edit” button.
8. Select “Administrators” (or add that group if it isn’t already there) and check the “Full Control” box in the Allow column.
9. “OK” out of all the properties and permissions dialogs.
10. While in “C:\Windows\ehome”, copy ehshell.exe and paste it somewhere safe as a backup, in case you ever need to restore.
Now, we can copy the new launcher.
11. From this folder (the one this readme file is in), copy ehshell.exe
12. Paste the modified “ehshell.exe” in the “C:\Windows\ehome” directory.
XBMC
I recently took up the task of switching my media center software from Windows 7 Media Center to the Windows version of XBMC. I found XBMC easier to get working with obscure encodings of video files (it uses mplayer instead of the normal codec engine). But, my reasons for switching are not the point of this post. The point here is that switching to XBMC from Windows Media Center has a few challenges. One such challenge is getting the Windows Media Center remote to work in a nice way. Luckily, some excellent work has been done on that front. People have already provided premade media center remote configurations for XBMC. However, the “start” button on the media center remote still had the nasty habit of launching the Windows 7 Media Center app instead of launching XBMC.
I looked around the ol’ Internet for a solution to this problem. Turns out, the behavior of that “Start” or “Green” button on the media center remote is to cause a special key combination to be pressed. This key combination is bound to launching “C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe.” The quickest workaround to the problem is to change ehshell.exe to something that launches XBMC. I then saw some people had written some batch files that launched XBMC. They then used a batch-to-exe converter to make it an executable and replaced ehshell.exe. That was great, but it still had a weakness. If, for some reason, XBMC was taken out of the foreground, it wouldn’t come back. Bummer. So I fixed it!
I wrote a little application to launch XBMC. It does a few things. First, it will check if XBMC is already running. If it is, it will bring it to the foreground for you. If it isn’t running, it will launch it. It will first try using the install location in the registry to find where to launch XBMC from. If it can’t find that, it will try the default location of the XBMC.exe file (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions).
Installing it still requires replacing ehshell.exe, which admittedly, is fairly annoying, but it is better than nothing!
Download The Launcher (source code and Visual Studio project are included)
Install instructions:
We need to change permissions on the default launcher so we can copy over it:
1. Go to “C:\Windows\ehome”
2. In the “ehome” directory, right click “ehshell.exe” and choose “Properties”
3. Click on the “Security” tab and click on the “Advanced” button at the bottom.
4. Click on the “Owner” tab and click the “Edit” button.
5. Select “Administrators” and hit “OK.”
6. Click “OK” in the “Advanced Security Settings for ehshell.exe” dialog.
7. In the “ehshell.exe Properties” dialog, click on “Administrators” under “Group or user names” and click the “Edit” button.
8. Select “Administrators” (or add that group if it isn’t already there) and check the “Full Control” box in the Allow column.
9. “OK” out of all the properties and permissions dialogs.
10. While in “C:\Windows\ehome”, copy ehshell.exe and paste it somewhere safe as a backup, in case you ever need to restore.
Now, we can copy the new launcher.
11. From this folder (the one this readme file is in), copy ehshell.exe
12. Paste the modified “ehshell.exe” in the “C:\Windows\ehome” directory.
Finally, here is the (very simple) source code:
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| using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using Microsoft.Win32;
namespace XbmcLauncher
{
static class Program
{
[DllImport ("user32.dll")]
private static extern bool SetForegroundWindow (IntPtr hWnd );
/// <summary>
/// The main entry point for the application.
/// </summary>
static void Main ()
{
Process [] processes = Process .GetProcessesByName("XBMC");
if (processes .Length != 0)
{
// If XBMC is currently running, bring it to the foreground
IntPtr hWnd = processes [0].MainWindowHandle;
SetForegroundWindow (hWnd );
return;
}
else
{
OpenXbmc ();
}
}
private static void OpenXbmc ()
{
string xbmcPath = null;
// Attempt to find the XBMC executable location via the registry
RegistryKey key = Registry .CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"Software\XBMC");
if (key != null) // If the path is in the registry use it to open XBMC
{
xbmcPath = key .GetValue("") as string;
if (LaunchXbmcProcess (xbmcPath + @"\XBMC.exe"))
return;
}
else // Otherwise, we'll try to use the default locations
{
string x86Path = @"C:\Program Files\XBMC\XBMC.exe";
string x64Path = @"C:\Program Files (x86)\XBMC\XBMC.exe";
if (LaunchXbmcProcess (x86Path ))
return;
else
LaunchXbmcProcess (x64Path );
}
}
private static bool LaunchXbmcProcess (string path )
{
if (path != null && File .Exists(path ))
{
Process proc = new Process ();
proc .StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo (path );
proc .Start();
return true;
}
return false;
}
}
} |
Programming | Jacob June 3, 2010 | 
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