How to select an audio channel if the Audio menu does not appear in Update Rollup 2

I recently heard from a customer who lives in Spain and has been using Media Center 2005 for a while. After installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005, they reported to me that they could no longer change the audio channel for their television shows from stereo to SAP because they could not find the Audio menu in the TV Settings menu on their system anymore. After digging through the source code and asking around on the team a little bit, here is what I found out about this scenario:

In Media Center 2005, there was an Audio menu under Settings | TV. This Audio menu contained an audio channel spinner that let you choose between stereo and SAP. It also contained other spinners and text boxes that could be used to configure captioning for television shows. The Audio menu was configured to always be displayed in the list of TV Settings menues, no matter what locale you lived in and configured your OS for.

In Update Rollup 2, the captioning settings have been broken out into a separate menu under Settings | TV. This left the stereo/SAP spinner as the only item in the Audio menu. Therefore, we added a condition to the Audio menu itself so it would be hidden in locales that did not support SAP.

In the case of this customer, they indicated to me that Spain technically does not support SAP, but they do support NICAM DUAL, which works roughly the same way to deliver alternate audio tracks for television shows. However, Media Center treats Spain as a locale that does not support SAP and hides the Audio menu entirely.

I am not sure if there are any countries or regions other than Spain affected by this logic change in the Audio settings menu in Media Center 2005. There is not any workaround to enable this menu in an affected country or region, but there are a couple of registry values that can be updated to cause Media Center to use the SAP audio channel instead of the default stereo channel.

You can click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd, and then run the following 2 commands in a cmd prompt to set the registry values necessary to enable the SAP audio channel in Media Center 2005:

  • reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings" /v PreferredLanguageID /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
  • reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings" /v SAPOn /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f