I had been meaning to take a look at the Windows Media Center sideshow gadgets for some time now and since Windows Mobile can host Sideshow gadgets I thought I would give it a try on my HP Mobile.

The first part of the installations is to download and install the release version of the Sideshow gadgets for Media Center (64bit and 32bit), when I ran the install it told me I needed the Sideshow Managed Runtime 1.0 which can be download from Microsoft. Once I had the Runtime installed I could install the sideshow gadgets

Then I install the Sideshow Developer Preview on my phone by downloading the update from here and copying WindowsSideShowForWindowsMobile.CAB to my phone and running the install, then I had to pair up the phone with the PC via Bluetooth. I could then go to the Sideshow control panel in Windows and enable the Media Center gadgets.

Once everything was installed I ran the Sideshow application and connect to the host PC. On the Media Center gadgets I could choose whether to connect to my log in on the Media Center machine or an Extender session.

I did have some trouble with the running of the gadgets, sometimes the gadgets would not pull the information back from the host machine and occasionally it would restart Media Center so I would say it’s not 100% stable yet but once I had it all up and running I found the gadgets were usefu

In this video I take a look at some of the features of the gadgets including Now Playing, browsing the guide data, playing music and selecting pictures

Note: This was done with the standard version of Media Center and not the TV Pack version which may not work with Sideshow

0 thoughts on “Video: Windows Media Center Sideshow gadgets on Windows Mobile”
  1. In your video, when you play music, then go to “Now Playing” it was displaying text saying “nothing is currently playing” Is this normal or is it related to the mediacenter crashing in the background before you started playing the music? Just curious.

    Thank you for the video

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