Windows Media Center for the Family

Greater safety for your children

Windows Media Center, included in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate, features several elements that help parents feel more secure and comfortable about the media their children watch.

Electronic Programming Guide helps find appropriate content

Windows Media Center's Electronic Programming Guide (the Guide) features powerful search capabilities that help to quickly find shows using common categories such as Kids, Movies, or Sports. Available in select countries, the Guide is a free service that covers as many as 14 days of future programming. With it, you can easily browse and record current and future programs—get movie and TV ratings, date and time listings, as well as summaries for all the programming offered by your local TV service, including cable, satellite and terrestrial (e.g., standard network) TV providers.

Increased peace of mind with Parental Controls

When you turn on Parental Controls, you put in place a screening mechanism so that TV and movie content that exceeds the maximum allowed rating cannot be viewed. Since not all TV and movie programming is rated, you can also configure Parental Controls to block unrated content. To do this, you specify an access code that you can then use later to access restricted content or to change parental control settings. It is recommended that you write down the code for future reference.¹

See what you can control with Parental Controls

Control what your children see on their PCs.

Use the Xbox 360 Arcade with Windows Media Center

The new Xbox 360 Arcade², which includes several family features, can be used as an "extender" to stream media to multiple rooms in the house. Learn more about Extenders for Windows Media Center.

Read about Xbox 360's family features

¹ Note that Parental Controls are not available in all countries/regions. Occasionally, when you set parental controls to restrict shows that exceed a certain rating, they may still be played if the rating information transmitted with the TV signal is different from the rating listed in the Guide. Windows Media Center uses the ratings from the TV broadcast signal to determine which shows to block. However, the rating information that you view in the Guide is downloaded from the Internet. In rare cases, the Guide rating might not match the rating information received from the TV broadcast signal.

² The Xbox 360 is the only Windows XP generation Extender for Windows Media Center that is compatible with Windows Vista.