Okay, here's my story...

I have installed Windows Media Center Edition 2005 on a slightly older Dell Lattitude PIII that i had lying around my apartment.  I do not care about the remote features, or tv tuning, all i really want to do is hook it up to my TV so i can easily play Divx and Xvid files on my TV. 

When i launch the media center, i get the following error:

"Your video card or drivers are not compatible with Media Center"

When i press, "OK" media center loads with no problem and i can browse my videos.  However, when i try to play one, i get another error:

"VIDEO ERROR Files needed to display video are not installed or not working correctly.  Please restart Media Center and/or restart the computer."

Needless to say, restarting either of these does not work.  I have tried to find appropriate video drivers for the card in this laptop, but they don't exist. (ATI Mobility 128 AGP 2x)

I've searched the internet, and only came up with one possible solution at
http://board.iexbeta.com/index.php?showtopic=43980&view=findpost&p=563109
which involves decompiling the exshell.exe, replacing one of the lines of code, and recompiling it (using a new exshell.res that i found on the Media Center 2005 on a Windows 2003 Server topic).  However, when i try and run the recompiled file i get the error:

"Strong name validation failed for assembly 'C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe'. The file may have been tampered with or it was partially signed but not fully signed with the correct private key." 

Replacing ehshell with an original version brings me back to my orignial problem.

So my question is.. How Can I Do This??? Again, all i want to do is have the capability for media center to play divx or xvid files.  (btw- they play correctly in WMP 10 on the same computer).

Any help is greatly appreciated!!!!!!!!

Thanks...

(I also have no idea why half of this post is in bold... its not like that when i try to edit it!!)

run

 \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\CasPol.exe -s off

turns off validation

Why don't you download the latest catalyst drivers from ATI they're supposed to be compatible with both notebook and desktop GPU's.

Still the same problem with both the hacked and orginial exe's....

Tried that, the catalyst driver's are only compatable with the radeons, this card isn't one of those

I don't think i mentinoed this, but this is a clean MCE 2005 install with CDs from MSDN, not sure if that matters....

I had the same problem on my ATI mobility Radeon 9600, what I did was to download the ATI Omega Drivers, they worked fine, once you turned on WMP acceleration.

They can be found on http://www.omegadrivers.net/

 

Cheers

I also tried the command to turn off validation.  No luck.

Does anyone have another way to bypass the video card validation?

Thanks

By any chance does your video card have only 32Mb (or less) of RAM on it?

MCE2005 has a hard-coded limitation so that it will only run on systems with more than 32Mb of Video RAM. I've been fighting this to get it to work on my Toshiba m200 Tablet PC, which has a built-in NVidia Go5200 with 32Mb of RAM. I've modified ehshell.exe to remove the limitation and it seems to work pretty well (no warning message, videos/dvr-ms/picture slideshows etc. work properly, and you get the fancy animated menu system and effects rather than the 'remote desktop' limited version. For some reason, my machine is crashing every so often but I don't yet know if that's due to a memory issue, or (more likely) the beta video drivers I have installed.

If you want to try the modifications to ehshell.exe, let me know and I'll post more details.

What/where do you have to remove in the ehshell.

I'm not in front of my dev machine at the moment, but I believe if you search for 'VideoMemoryTotal' in the ehshell.il file, you'll see it followed by an instruction with 0x2000000 in it (32Mb). If you change the value to 0x1000000 it will allow it to run on a 32Mb card.

(For convenience, after recompiling I recommend naming the new executable 'ehshell16.exe' before putting it in the eHome directory so that SFP doesn't get upset... you still have to turn off strong signing though).

If you can't find it with these instructions let me know and I'll dig out my build files and give you a more precise reference.

What program do you use to modify ehshell.exe?  What is the process for saving the new file and making sure it is not overwritten.  I have been searching the forum for an hour and cant seem to find an answer.  Sorry if this is redundant.

Thanks in advance.

 

Okay, here's more detailed instructions for those wanting to try this mod. This is all based on Rafael's MCE Exposed Guide. See the links at the bottom for the various components you may need:

1) Install the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK (and the .NET Framework 1.1 itself from WindowsUpdate if you don't already have it) from [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9B3A2CA6-3647-4070-9F41-A333C6B9181D&displaylang=en]

2) Copy the "ehshell.exe" file from "C:\Windows\eHome" to a temporary directory.

3) Run "ildasm" (under "C:\Program Files\Microsoft .NET\FrameworkSDK\v1.1\bin"). Open the "ehshell.exe" file from wherever you put it. Go to File > Dump and in the options dialog that appears afterwards make sure only 'Dump IL Code' and 'Expand try/catch' checkboxes are checked. Click ok and save the resulting IL file in a separate directory (resources will fall out hence the new directory) and call it "ehshell.il". It should be a whopping 20-30MB.

4) Open the "ehshell.il" file in a text editor (Wordpad or Notepad if necessary, but preferably something a bit better - Wordpad/Notepad may take a LONG time to open the file!). Search for the string "get_UsableVideoMemory". Just below that, you should see a value of "0x2000000". Change this value to "0x1000000", so that you see something similar to the text below. Save the file (waiting patiently) and close your editor.

      IL_003d:  call       int32 [EhCM]eHome.UI.Drawing.Dx7OutputDevice::get_UsableVideoMemory()
      IL_0042:  stloc.1
      IL_0043:  br.s       IL_004b
      IL_0045:  call       int32 [EhCM]eHome.UI.Drawing.Dx9OutputDevice::get_UsableVideoMemory()
      IL_004a:  stloc.1
      IL_004b:  ldloc.1
      IL_004c:  ldc.i4     0x1000000
      IL_0051:  bge.s      IL_0069

5) Delete the "ehshell.exe" in your temporary directory, and recompile the file by bringing up a command window, going to your temporary directory, and typing "C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\ilasm /resource:ehshell.res /exe ehshell.il". If this fails, try replacing your "ehshell.res" file with Turge's version posted at 12/8/2004 6:17 PM under the following link: http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=27&MessageID=78447&TopicPage=1

6) Rename the new "ehshell.exe" in your temporary directory to "ehshell16.exe" and copy it into the "C:\Windows\eHome" directory (renaming it stops Windows File Protection from overwriting it with the original version).

7) Allow the unsigned package to be executed by running the following in a command window: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft .NET\FrameworkSDK\v1.1\bin\sn -Vr c:\windows\ehome\ehshell16.exe".

8) Add a shortcut to ehshell16.exe to your desktop and give it a try!

If you follow all of these steps correctly, and still get the "Your video card or drivers are not compatible" error then make absolutely sure you are using the latest drivers for your graphics card. I also don't know if this will work on some older graphics cards (pre-DirectX9.0) - basically, I think it should work for anything on the official "supported cards" list that simply has too little memory fitted, plus most other DX9-capable cards. There are more mods you could try to force it to run on older systems but I haven't tried it myself and don't recommend it... I'm guessing MS limited MCE to higher-end systems for a reason! (I have an old laptop that doesn't run MCE even with this mod, using a Radeon Mobility 7500, so I'm going to experiment with drivers/hacks to see if I can get it to run when I get the chance).

Hope this helps!

[edited to correct compilation command line]

I'm having the same problem with an ATI Radeon 9600SE card (which used to work in my MCE 2005 setup). I deinstalled the old drivers and installed the latest MCE drivers from ATI's website. Now I get an error everytime MCE starts and I cannot play any recorded TV. This all started because I was having trouble playing DVDs, deinstalling the DVD driver that came with the card didn't work so I deinstalled all the ATI software figuring I'd update it while I was at it...now the old/original drivers won't work, the new drivers from the web won't work, I'm gonna cry.

MCM

let me know if you figure out a way to run mce2005 with the mobility 7500.  I am in the same boat.

 

Thanks