Launching MediaBrowser and Netflix from Mediaportal

Since the MediaBrowser plug-in for Mediaportal has stalled and is now pretty much unusable, I've been spending my weekend looking at ways to get MediaPortal to launch external applications like MediaBrowser Theater and Netflix.

The MultiShortcut plugin for MediaPortal works well for the former - you can set it up as a tile on the MediaPortal home screen that, when clicked, launches MediaBrowser Theater and hides MP, bringing MP back to life when MediaBrowser is shut down.

This gets around the issues with using the MediaBrowser plug-in and seems to work pretty well. MediaBrowser Theater also supports remote control so it feels well integrated.

Netflix, on the other hand is a bit more challenging.

It's a Windows Store App so there's no obvious way to make a shortcut or find an .exe to launch from MultiShorcut. A quick search, however, revealed this easy process to make a shortcut for an App which I was able to use to construct the MultiShortcut exefile and arguments strings required. Here's the resulting settings for my system;

There's still no way that I can find to control the Netflix App with a remote control so it'll be necessary to pick up a keyboard or mouse for that task but this is close to good overall.


Note: The MultiShortcut plugin works with MediaPortal 1.10 but needs to be installed manually. MultiShortcut_v2.5 was the version I used. Here's the MediaPortal Config. Startup/Resume settings I'm using to make the switching between apps pretty much seamless;