Friday, April 25, 2008

Dell Media direct enhancement

(This post is for people searching for information on Media Direct of Dell laptops)

I found a way to install vlc player in Dell's Media Direct.

The default player of Media direct can't 'seek' videos while playing. It also cant play Divx files. VLC player overcomes these shortcomings.

I would recommend keeping Media direct as it saves battery power when you are say traveling and only want to play videos/songs. Some people suggest removing it when they re-partition their s

Its easy to install VLC player. Basically Media direct loads under windows xp embedded OS which is in background.

All you need to do is to boot from some liveCD, copy the taskmgr.exe from main (vista/xp) windows' system32 folder to the windows/system32 folder on Mediadirect partition.

Then shut down the system, press media direct button. once it starts, u can press alt+ctrl+del to invoke taskmgr. There u can start new task as explorer, then browse to the setup of vlc player and complete installation.

Next time, again launch taskmgr to start VLC player and then browse for the video files..

I haven't tried but I guess many other popular applications may get installed (like winamp)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, thanks for the info but I have another question. Is there any way I can access my NAS through Media Direct?
Thanks,
Steven

Milind said...

i guess we can give it a try.. send me an email and we'll discuss..
(my mail id is on the right side of the blog)