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.

Newest version of the rental screen homepage in Daytime mode

OfflineMode

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.

Accessing Service Menus

It's possible to access multiple service menus via Kiosk Engine.

Field Maintenance via Rental Menu

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 can go no further past this point. If authentication does succeed, you will enter the Field Maintenance Application.

Redbox Desktop via Keyboard

From anywhere (assuming the application is responding and kiosk is initialized), you can use the key combo CTRL + ALT + ENTER to access a Redbox Control Panel Login panel. Kiosks in OfflineMode allow use of any credentials to login. 

If login succeeds, you will be sent to the Redbox Desktop.

“Select Resource Bundle” Menu via Keyboard

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.

 

Autobooting to the default Windows desktop environment

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 Windows desktop environment will show by default. 

To switch back to the default kiosk engine autoboot, change the value to C:\Program Files\Redbox\KioskShell\KioskShell.exe