Hi, I'm Peter Dampier a Program Manager in the eHome division at Microsoft. Many thanks to Aaron and Charlie for this blog and the opportunity to post here.  One of the new features in Windows Vista Media Center post Beta 2 is extensibility for adding HD DVD and/or Blu-ray Disc movie playback to Windows Media Center in Vista.   I thought I'd spend a few moments here to explain this functionality...

There are two main features: 

1. The ability to launch a third party playback application when a HD DVD or BD disc is inserted into the drive and MCE is full screen.  If MCE is not full screen then the regular 2’ Windows auto play is used.
2. The ability to launch a third party application if a HD DVD or BD disc is in the optical drive and “Play DVD’ is selected from the MCE start menu

 To register your HD DVD or BD playback app there are two new categories for application registration:

 AutoPlay\HD DVD

 And

 AutoPlay\Blu-ray

Two examples are below.  These will register Notepad.exe to launch when MCE is full screen and a HD DVD is inserted and for Calc.exe to launch when a Blu-ray Disc is inserted.  These could also be regular native MCE applications (e.g. HTML/ActveX, MCML or XBAP).  For external .exe's the application developer will need to ensure that they restore MCE to its previous postion after the .exe closes.  A demonstration of how this can be done is available with the MCE games that ship in Vista (check out MCE's Program Library Game content).  Without this the user will be left in a state where they need to reach for the mouse or keyboard after finishing HD DVD playback in the external application versus automatically being returned to MCE. 

To use these samples save the XML below to c:\notepad.xml and c:\calc.xml.  Then register the apps with:

C:\Windows\ehome\RegisterMCEApp.exe /allusers c:\notepad.xml

C:\Windows\ehome\RegisterMCEApp.exe /allusers c:\calc.xml

To un-register:

C:\Windows\ehome\RegisterMCEApp.exe /u /allusers c:\notepad.xml

C:\Windows\ehome\RegisterMCEApp.exe /u /allusers c:\calc.xml

For the applications to show up in the regular MCE Program library they will also need to be registered against other categories with a separate registration.

XML for HD DVD – Launch notepad.exe:

 <application title="Notepad" id="{ABCE8379-F381-47b8-AE3D-EF6ADE750500}" companyname="Sample Company" companylogourl="http://company/icon2.jpg" description="HD DVD App">

    <entrypoint id="{ABCE8379-F381-47b8-AE3D-EF6ADE750501}" RUN="c:\windows\notepad.exe" title="Notepad (Sample HDDVD App)" description="Notepad - a text editor">

        <category category="AutoPlay\HD DVD"/>

    </entrypoint>

</application>

XML for Blu-ray Disc – Launch calc.exe

<application title="Notepad" id="{2C5ECB67-E585-4301-BAF4-5380FE6C26AB}" companyname="Sample Company" companylogourl=" http://company/icon2.jpg" description="BD App">

    <entrypoint id="{2C5ECB67-E585-4301-BAF4-5380FE6C26AB}" RUN="c:\windows\System32\Calc.exe" title="Calculator (Sample Blu-Ray App)" description="Calculator application ">

        <category category="AutoPlay\Blu-ray"/>

    </entrypoint>

</application>

If more than one application is registered against each category then the user is presented with a page to select the playback app they wish to use.

If no applications are registered the following dialogs appear:

Peter.