How to Speed up the Windows 7 Media Center Background
Information
Those of you who used Windows 7 Beta may have noticed that when you play an album in WMC, the animated background displays all of your album art as a 'waterfall'. In newer builds this has significantly slowed down.
Windows Media Center is not available in the Windows 7 Starter and Windows 7 Home Basic editions.
Warning
Please create a backup copy of ehres.dll
I'll show you how to speed it up!!
1. Firstly, you'll need a copy of
restorator and
xml notepad. 2. Once you have these tools (you'll need them a lot for hacking WMC!) Lets go to
A:\Windows\ehome and find
ehres.dll,
take ownership of it, make a copy and name it
ehres BACKUP.dll Open both restorator and XML notepad.
3. Next step is to open up
ehres.dll in restorator. In the left hand pane navigate to the
html folder, expand it and find a file called
albumartbackground.xml.
Drag this file to the desktop.
4. Minimize restorator and call up XML Notepad. Now,
drag the albumartbackground.xml file into XML Notepad.
5. In the left hand pane navigate to the
first UI folder, then the
Locals folder and finally, the
second Timer folder. The default timer will be set to
2000, if you want the 'waterfall' to be twice as fast set it to 1000 etc. I have mine set to 150 and it works beautifully.
Note
If you try and make the animation too fast, it won't render correctly. 75 is the lowest i've managed to get it.
6. When you have your preferred speed
save the file in XML notepad, minimize XML notepad, call back restorator and drag albumartbackground.xml file back to where it was.
Save ehres.dll in restorator. You'll get a message about the trial, just click OK. Delete the XML file from the desktop.
7. Open up WMC and play an album to be sure it renders correctly. If it's too slow decrease the number, if it fails, set it to 250 (should be safe) and try again. Remember the default is 2000.
It sounds complicated but it isn't. Read the instructions a couple of times or have this snapped to one side whilst you work on it.
Put the ehres BACKUP.dll into a folder and store it away safely!!
Hope you enjoy this one
Windows Media Center - Speed Up Background 
