Tommy Nation

By installing the Media Control Plugin for Vista Media Center by Damien Bain-Thouverez, you can finally play back video files with subtitles, especially files using the Matroska container format (MKV). Multiple subtitles support, multiple audio streams support, FFDShow settings tweaking, and much much more is enabled.

The plugin can even hook on to the remote control driver and enable access to customizeable special functions and shortcuts when using a Media Center compatible remote control. There’s even a newly added feature that enables Windows Live Messenger integration. I haven’t tested this one myself yet, though.

If this is just what you’ve been looking for, then head on over to the homepage and download it now! Be sure to read the requirements section carefully before you install it.

Thank you Damien for this great plugin! Please show your support by donating to him if you find it useful.

To be able to access administrative shares and shut it down remotely, I added another user to my media center computer (HTPC) matching my usual username and password. Upon next boot, I discovered that instead of being logged on automatically, I was now presented with a logon screen, where I had to choose between the default (passwordless) user and my newly created “remote control” account.

“There’s got to be a way to get the automatic logon back”, I thought. Of course there is! Following is the simple solution to configure automatic logon in Vista. (Please bare with me, and pretend that the Norwegian screenshots are in English for now.)

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Even if your Windows Vista user account is a member of the Administrators group, you are still asked to give applications permission to access your system in different ways. To enable the hidden Vista Administrator account, and become free of these hassles, just follow these directions:

1. In the search field of the Start menu, type “cmd” and right-click the cmd.exe suggestion that pops up in the results.
2. Select “Run as administrator”.
3. In the command prompt window, type (without the quotes) “net user administrator /active:yes”.
4. Log out of your Vista session, and - voilà - the administrator account is now selectable.

Even if you consider yourself an advanced Windows user, beware that activating the Administrator account makes your system more vulnerable when you are logged in as this user. It’s the same as being logged in as the root user in Linux, in that applications will now get access to your file system like in Windows XP.

When you have more than one computer in your local network, you may want to be able to access all your files on all your machines, whichever one you’re sitting at. Here’s how you can accomplish that in Windows:

To be able to access all files you will be using something called Administrative Shares. These are hidden shares of your local hard disks and optical drives. These shares are not like normal shared folders, in that they require administrative access to open.

An administrative share always has a dollar ($) sign directly behind it, and do not show up by default when you access a computer through Windows Explorer. To access the C:\ drive for instance, you would type this in the address bar of Windows Explorer: \\Computername\c$

This alone is not enough however, as you still need the administrative access rights. To get this, all you have to do is to create an account on each computer that has administrative rights, and the same username and password. To do this, open Control Panel and go to User Accounts and make the necessary account and/or password changes there.

Now, whenever you want access to your files on your other machines, just open Windows Explorer and type in \\Computername\c$ in the address bar - replacing the letter c with the drive letter of the hard disk you want to access.

There’s an additional administrative share that’s standard on all Windows computers, and this is the Windows folder. To access this share, type \\Computername\admin$. If Windows was installed on a different drive than the C:\ drive, it doesn’t matter when you use this share. Pretty useful when you want to view Windows log files on remote machines.

Windows Vista troubleshooting:
In Windows Vista you will get prompted to enter a username and password. Enter the username and password, and tick the box to remember the password if you don’t want to be bothered again. You may get problems here, being denied access even if you entered the correct username and password. Should this be the case, you should read my previous article on enabling admin shares in Vista.