Kiosk Engine is the custom application designed by Redbox for use on the kiosks by both employees and customers. By default, Kiosk Engine boots into a rental menu after the device initializes.
The rental menu features both a day and night mode. During the day, the rental screen will use white backgrounds to enhance contrast in sunlight. In evening hours, the menu will use black backgrounds to avoid eye strain from bright display panels.
This rental menu allows users to rent, buy, return, or pickup reserved movies. When the device is in OfflineMode, the kiosk will allow users to only rent 3 movies at a time. Some movies may be restricted from rental or purchase while in OfflineMode, though the reason for this is not fully understood. The card used to complete transactions in OfflineMode can be used multiple times as the kiosk does not make any attempt to limit this.
All kiosks are in OfflineMode as Redbox's services no longer exist.
It's possible to access multiple service menus via Kiosk Engine.
On the homepage, press the ? or Help button. Once on the help page, tap/click the Redbox logo. “Please Wait” will appear briefly before being replaced with a login screen.
Without patching DLLs or emulating the authentication servers, you cannot go any further past this point. If authentication does succeed, you will enter the Field Maintenance Application.
From anywhere (assuming the application is responding and the kiosk is initialized), you can use the key combo CTRL + ALT + ENTER to access a Redbox Control Panel Login panel. Kiosks in OfflineMode allow the use of any credentials to log in.
If the login succeeds, you will be sent to the Redbox Desktop.
There is a way to open a menu that allows selecting “Resource Bundles” without the use of a discrete chain of keyboard combinations or UI interactions. You can access this menu by pressing the ` key on a keyboard.
This section only covers a temporary normal desktop environment that will not persist across reboots, if you would like it to persist until you manually change it, follow the instructions in Autobooting to the Normal Windows Desktop Environment.
The following will NOT work on a Windows 7 machine, this will only work on Windows 10 or Windows 11!
To get a normal desktop environment until you power off the PC, open command prompt from the Redbox Desktop and type explorer, the first time this is done will launch the normal desktop environment, any subsequent calls will open a new explorer window.
If you want to prevent the autoboot of Kiosk Engine and would rather boot to a standard Windows desktop environment, you need to edit the Shellregistry key located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
You want to change the value of this key to C:\Windows\explorer.exe
After you change the value, reboot the machine and the normal Windows desktop environment will be displayed.
To switch back to the default kiosk engine autoboot, change the value to C:\Program Files\Redbox\KioskShell\KioskShell.exe