I recently upgraded my media centre hardware setup, mostly to gain HDMI out from my motherboard directly, as I'd bought a new AV receiver with HDMI switching. So I have a setup now where I feed in my Foxtel (cable box) and Media Centre to the Pioneer receiver, then the receiver has HDMI into my plasma TV. It has really simplified my setup, but introduced a new issue...now when I use my harmony remote to turn the media centre on, it almost always starts up in 4:3 mode instead of 16:9. The "fix" is to exit WMC, the screen blanks, then the windows desktop shows up in 16:9. I press the green button to start WMC again and it starts in 16:9 and all is good. Anyone know why it's waking in 4:3 though? Of course this is complicated now by the fact the latest windows update seems to have killed the ability to start WMC via the green button.
Thanks for your reply. I tried this several times, but when I run TestRights, I 1st get this warning "Windows Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk." and then I can choose "More Info" and let in run, but the CMD screen just flashes quickly and then disappears, so I can't paste anything into it. It did that when I tried to run the Uninstaller.cmd as well. I tried disabling my firewall, but no luck. Any other ideas?
@StefanR I've been looking at Windows 7 PC on one of my spare PCs and ehtray stops running after a while on there as well. It seems that eftray is the first that starts when the green button is pressed on the remote and ehtray seems to start ehshell. The other thing I noticed is that ehsched seems to stay running on my Windows 7 but not on my Windows 10. Unfortunately, starting ehsched doesn't make any difference. I haven't tried going back to older versions of Windows 10 to compare the difference.
I assume from your description that you have Media Center set to start automatically. What happens if you disable that, start the PC then launch Media Center? Does the PC recognise the Receiver and TV properly (correct display with full control over screen size and refresh rate)? What devices you have shown on your system? Is there a TV and a Receiver? are there updated inf files or drivers for them?
I have observed ehtray closing after 10 seconds on earlier versions of Windows 10. It seems like something else has to be running for ehtray to start, but I have no idea what that is. Maybe pressing the green button allows this 'something else' to start ehtray, which then passes a start command to ehshell. The question is whether letting ehtray run in the background (using the ehtrayexitdelay) means that when you press the green button, since ehtray is already running, ehshell will start. Unfortunately I don't have a remote to test this out....
Yes media center does start when ehtray is running but I had problems when I tried to keep restarting it so there must be a trigger that starts it as needed. I'm looking at the registry on my w7 test box and comparing it to a w10 one as I write.
I've tried uninstalling using the "uninstaller.cmd" within the 8.8.1 folder, but WMC doesn't seam to uninstall. I've restarted a few times and still no luck. CMD screen still flashes right after the warning screen appears and I choose to "run anyway" then disappears right before a screen pops up asking me if I want to allow this app to make changes to this device.
I've tried this, disabling it in Edge as well as Windows Defender, slid the UAC to bottom, than I get an Open File -Security Warning "Unknown publisher" warning, click to run it, and same result. TestRights just flashes, Uninstaller looks like it runs a script, then goes away. Once I hopefully get this running, should I be setting the UAC slider back to where it was? Doesn't seem like I need it in Edge.
There are way too many differences between W7 and W10 so I'm going to install an older version of W10 on one of my boxes and use that as a reference. Meanwhile, I've been reading up on how the remote control mechanism works and found there are a lot of people who have spent a lot of time getting the RC6 working with other products. There are some useful utilities such as showkey and advancedmceremotemapper out there as well. I managed to configure eventghost so that it opens media center without ehtray running but it seems complete overkill just to remap a few buttons and, while it proves that the buttons actually works, it doesn't help understand why media center is broken now and it shouldn't be necessary to use third party tools to do its job anyway.
How do I go about doing this? I can't uninstall the original, and when I try to install again, it says I already have it.
Did the green button still work on16299.15? I installed it last week, I think it did work but I'm not 100% sure or did it stop working after some update after that.