SoftSled aims to be a faithful, nearly fully-featured Media Center Extender — not a screen-share. It speaks the same protocols a hardware extender does, so Media Center treats it as the real thing.
The genuine Media Center 10-foot interface — menus, animations and all — rendered on your extender PC and driven with the keyboard or a remote.
Watch live TV from the host's tuners and play back recorded TV, streamed over RTSP straight from Media Center.
Hardware-accelerated video decode for both H.264 and MPEG-2 content delivered by the host.
Audio streaming with MP3 and PCM playback, plus proper volume and mute control synced with the host.
Browse and view your photo library through the Media Center pictures experience.
The signature Media Center navigation and UI sounds are forwarded and played, so the shell feels exactly like the real thing.
Point a standard Media Center RC6 remote at an MCE infrared receiver on the extender PC and drive the shell with it. Button presses are translated to Media Center commands and forwarded to the host — the green Start button even launches the session.
Media Center's translucent overlays — program info, transport bars — are composited over full-motion video with real per-pixel alpha.
SoftSled generates its own extender certificate during setup, so there's no manual certificate wrangling to get paired.
A small admin tool prepares the host PC in seconds — and fully reverses every change if you decide.
A regular remote-desktop session gives you a flat, opaque picture. SoftSled goes further: it decodes the host's UI as an alpha-bearing layer and composites it on top of the video plane on the GPU. The result is Media Center's trademark glassy overlays sitting correctly over live and recorded video — picture-in-picture, transport controls and program info included.
See how it's done →
Where things stand today. SoftSled is an active reverse-engineering project, so this evolves — check GitHub for the latest.
| Capability | Status |
|---|---|
| Full pairing & configuration (with certificate generation) | Working |
| Device Services Lightweight Remoting (MS-DSLR) protocol | Working |
| Device capability & session negotiation (MS-DSPA / MS-DSMN) | Working |
| Media control (MS-DMCT) — play / pause / stop / seek | Working |
| RDP bitmap & remote-rendering shell display | Working |
| Interface sounds | Working |
| RC6 / MCE / custom remote-control forwarding | Working |
| Audio playback — MP3, PCM | Working |
| Video playback — MPEG-2, H.264 | Working |
| Audio / video sync engine | In progress |
| Client-side media transport controls | Planned |
| DRM-protected playback | Unlikely |
SoftSled can draw the Media Center interface two different ways. In GDI mode (RDP rendering) the host paints the UI and streams it to the extender as compressed bitmaps. In RUI mode (remote rendering, the same MS-RRSP2 scheme the Xbox 360 used) the host sends drawing instructions and the extender renders them locally — lighter on the network and far smoother, but it needs a low-latency link. The first-run wizard picks for you based on your connection: wired enables RUI, Wi-Fi falls back to GDI.
| Capability | GDI RDP rendering | RUI remote rendering |
|---|---|---|
| Where the UI is drawn | On the host, streamed as bitmaps | On the extender, from instructions |
| UI display | Yes | Yes |
| Transparent UI over video | Yes | Yes |
| UI sounds | Yes | Yes |
| UI frame rate | ~15–20 fps | Up to 60 fps |
| Video playback | Yes | Yes |
| A/V sync | In progress | In progress |
| Video picture-in-picture | Yes | Yes |
| Video zoom | Yes | No |
| WMC RC6 remote | Yes | Yes |
| Custom remote mapping | Yes | Yes |
| Network bandwidth | Higher (streamed images) | Lower (drawing commands) |
| Connection tolerance | Works over Wi-Fi | Wired / low-latency recommended |
Video zoom in RUI mode is an open question — we haven't yet worked out how Media Center communicates the zoom change to a remote-rendered extender, so SoftSled has nothing to act on.
From UPnP discovery to a patched FreeRDP transport and a hand-written RTSP A/V pipeline — it's a fun rabbit hole.