I ran across a thread on one of the team discussion aliases today that described a registry tweak for Windows Media Center for Windows Vista that I wanted to pass on.  There is a new feature in Windows Media Center for Windows Vista called the mini-guide.  It is a small window that appears as an overlay while you are watching live TV and you can quickly browse details of other shows on other channels.  You can get to the mini-guide by pressing More Info on the remote control while live TV is playing and choosing the Mini Guide option in the context menu.

By default, when you use the arrow buttons on the remote control to scroll through the mini-guide, it navigates channels in what feels like a non-intuitive way to me.  When you press the up arrow, the mini-guide browses to the previous channel and when you press the down arrow, the mini-guide browses to the next channel.  In other words, if you are on channel 5, pressing up moves you to channel 4, and pressing down moves you to channel 6.  This is the opposite scrolling order to the channel change buttons - pressing the channel up button moves you to channel 6 and pressing the channel down button moves you to channel 4.

Fortunately, there is a registry value you can change to invert the mini-guide scrolling behavior to force it to scroll the same way that channel up/down scrolls.  Here are the steps you can use to toggle this behavior:

1. Click on the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Accessories
2. Right-click on Command Prompt and choose Run as administrator
3. Click Allow to launch an administrator command prompt
4. Run reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings" /v ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
5. Close and re-open Windows Media Center for the change to take effect

If you want to change the mini-guide scrolling behavior back to the default (which will make it scroll the opposite direction of channel up/down scrolling), you can use these steps:

1. Click on the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Accessories
2. Right-click on Command Prompt and choose Run as administrator
3. Click Allow to launch an administrator command prompt
4. Run reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings" /v ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
5. Close and re-open Windows Media Center for the change to take effect

Hopefully this will be something we add to a future version of TweakMce.