How to Install Windows Media Center on Windows 10

Microsoft removed Windows Media Center from Windows 10, and there’s no official way to get it back but the community has made Windows Media Center functional on Windows 10.

As far as Microsoft is concerned, you can just keep using Windows 7 or 8.1 if you want Windows Media Center, although that’s becoming more and more difficult. Microsoft isn’t interested in supporting Windows Media Center any longer.

This process involves downloading a modified Windows Media Center application, if you’re uncomfortable with that, this may not be for you. We tried it ourselves and ran into no problems, the file shows up as clean on multiple malware scanners. I have uploaded these two compressed files to my Google Drive, the download links are below.

• Download Windows Media Center (64-bit)
  
  
• Download Windows Media Center (32-bit)
  

The downloaded archive is a .7z file, so you’ll also need to download and install 7-Zip to open it.

Once you have, you can right-click the downloaded .7z file in File Explorer and select 7-Zip > Extract Here from the context menu.



You’ll get a  folder. Open the extracted WMC folder, right-click the “_TestRights.cmd” file, and select “Run as Administrator”. A Command Prompt window will open, and you can close it.



You can then right-click the “Installer.cmd” file and select “Run as Administrator.”



You’ll see the progress of the installation in a Command Prompt window. Don’t close the window until you see the “Press any key to exit” message.



If you’ve previously installed this pack or if you upgraded from Windows 7 or 8.1 and previously had Windows Media Center installed, you may need to right-click the “Uninstaller.cmd” file and select “Run as Administrator” to remove any leftover bits of Windows Media Center before it will install normally. This is also the file you need to run if you ever want to completely uninstall Windows Media Center.

Type Windows Media Center into Start Menu and it will appear in your Start Menu as a normal application you can launch.



If you encounter another problem, open the Workarounds.txt file for more information. This file contains a list of problems people have encountered and fixes known to work.



While Windows Media Center currently works, it’s possible that future changes to Windows 10 might break it.