Warning:
By following this guide, you will lose all your settings including:
- metadata fetched through internet providers
- playstate (watched status)
- display settings
- cached images
- plugins
- media collections
- podcasts
If you decide to completely start over, here’s a guide to make sure that you completely uninstall and remove everything related to the Media Browser application.
This guide will not explain how to remove locally stored metadata that you've gathered through third party metadata fetchers.
Even though you want to completely uninstall, this topic also covers backing up existing settings so you can restore them in case you want to.
Uninstalling Media Browser
- Open Windows Control Panel
- Under “Programs” Click “Uninstall a Program” (Might be listed as “Programs and Features” if not sorted by categories)
- Select Media Browser from the list of installed applications and click “uninstall”
- Restart your computer
Under rare circumstances, it’s possible that a few files are left after performing the uninstall.
- Check if the “
C:\Program Files\MediaBrowser\MediaBrowser” (on 64 bit Windows “C:\Program Files (x86)\MediaBrowser\MediaBrowser”) folder is empty or that it doesn’t exist anymore. If it’s not empty or still exists, delete the folder. (keep in mind: not ProgramData, but Program Files) - Check if there’s a “MediaBrowser” file in “
C:\Windows\assembly”. If it exists, right-click it and choose “uninstall”. (Be very careful what you do in this folder!)
Backup settings
- Open Windows start menu, and type
%programdata%and press enter - Find the folder “MediaBrowser” and rename it to “MediaBrowser.old”
- Open Windows start menu, and type
%programfiles%(on 64 bit Windows type%programfiles(x86)%) and press enter - Find the folder “Media Browser” and rename it to “Media Browser.old” if it exists.
- Open Windows Explorer and navigate to “
C:\Windows\ehome”. Look for dll files that are named like Media Browser themes you had installed and delete them. (e.g. Diamond.dll, Vanilla.dll, Chocolate.dll) (Be very careful what you do in this folder!)
Performing the steps above will not actually delete the Media Browser settings files from your computer, but they will be unusable by Media Browser.
If you really want to remove all the Media Browser files from your computer, delete the 2 renamed Media Browser folders (“C:\Program Files\MediaBrowser\MediaBrowser” & “C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser”).
Restore settings
Some of your Media Browser settings can be transferred/restored if you want to. After you performed the Uninstallation steps above and reinstalled Media Browser you can transfer the following settings from “%programdata%\MediaBrowser.old” back to “%programdata%\MediaBrowser”.
Make sure that you first launched Media Browser 1 time. Launching Media Browser will make sure that all required files and folders have been recreated using default settings.
ImagesByName (if configured previously)
Copy contents from %programdata%\MediaBrowser.old\ImagesByName to %programdata%\MediaBrowser\ImagesByName
Plugins
You should really reinstall them through the configuration wizard to make sure they are installed correctly.
Podcasts
Copy contents from %programdata%\MediaBrowser.old\Podcasts to %programdata%\MediaBrowser\Podcasts
Media Collections aka Virtual Folders
Copy contents from %programdata%\MediaBrowser.old\StartupFolder to %programdata%\MediaBrowser\StartupFolder
Display settings
Copy contents from %programdata%\MediaBrowser.old\Cache\Display to %programdata%\MediaBrowser\Cache\Display
PlayState aka watched status
Copy contents from %programdata%\MediaBrowser.old\Cache\Playstate to %programdata%\MediaBrowser\Cache\Playstate