The Media Center Sandbox

The embedded IE plug-in support in Media Center seems to be stuck at IE 7. More apps these days are using HTML5 and assuming IE9.

Recently, YouTube have switched their Leanback interface to pure HTML5 which means it can no longer be hosted as an IE plug-in for Media Center. (Well, it can, but it doesn't work at all well because it's trying to run in an IE7 environment).

Has anyone experimented with ways to get hosted plug-ins running in IE9? Perhaps it would be possible to launch a standard MCML-based plug-in and somehow embed an IE9 object on the page?

Eddy

After a bit more research, you can tell the embedded Webcontrol to behave as IE9 rather than IE7 by creating this registry setting:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]
"ehExtHost32.exe"=dword:00002328

That's for Win64. For Win32, it should be (untested):

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]
"ehExtHost.exe"=dword:00002328

More info at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330730(v=vs.85).aspx

(0x2328 is 9000 in decimal; the default value for apps using the embedded webcontrol is 7000 which means ehExtHost.exe normally an IE7 version of the WebControl).

Unfortunately, even after adding this setting and confirming that MCE webpages now report IE9 rather than IE7, it still doesn't seem to fix the compatibility issues with Leanback; for example, the remote control arrow keys work fine in Leanback on the desktop but are ignored in Leanback running inside MCE.

Eddy

As an additional data point to the above: the remote direction keys seem to work okay in YouTube Leanback under Win32; it's only 64-bit Media Center where they fail.

Leanback runs inside the 32-bit version of IE / ehExtHost.exe, so possibly this is something to do with Remote events being converted to SendInput() windows events in 64-bit format but being parsed as 32-bit format by the IE code?

(Wouldn't explain why they seemed to work fine in the older Flash-based version of Leanback however.)