Gadgets - Windows Media Center - Display a Web Page

Display a Web Page from MCE

Updated 03-02-2009

Web Page

I wanted to show a webpage displaying the image from my security camera within Windows Media Center. I will show you the method I used, which is certainly not the best method but is very quick to do.

So we first need a web page, we can use an any web page however I have designed my own simple page that refreshes an image using JavaScript, view it here, use it for your own template if you wish.

We need to create a small text file and save it with a .MCL extension. My .MCL file is shown below, you can see it only have 5 lines of text

What's in the MCL file?

<application url=""c:\mywebpage\camera.htm"
name="My MCE Control"
bgcolor="RGB(1,33,186)"
startimage=".\cctv.jpg"
</application>

Line 1 shows the url location of the html we want to display, this could equally read:
<application url="http://www.google.com"

Line 2 is the name of the button that will be displayed in Media Center to select your web Page. You can put anything you want here.

Line 3 is the background colour of the button, you can use an online generate here to work out your colour.

Line 4, the start image is the picture that will be displayed on the Media Center Button, and can be any jpg file. The ".\" on my example indicates the picture will be stored in the same folder and my .MCL file.


Once we have created the .MCL and startimage files we need to copy them to our start menu, it will go here:
All Programs/Accessories/Media Center/Media Center Programs/

If you now fire up Media Center and navigate to Programs you should have a new button which, when pressed loads a copy of your web page.