How To Enable My DVD's For MCE

8T8

An introduction;
A friend asked how to setup My DVDs under MCE for hard drive based playback of his DVD collection so I looked into it a little more (I normally use My Movies). So I thought after a bit of research I’d post the gory details for those that wish to enable this nice feature as some of the existing posted information I found didn’t exactly fill you in on all the details.

Requirements;
A helluva lot of hard drive space, seriously. WinXP MCE 2005.


What is it;
Basically a gallery of your DVD’s that are selectable and playable without having to put a disc in. My DVD’s does much the same thing as My Movies does but on a more limited scale and is meant for DVD changers though a small thanks to the MS developers for including in the ability to play DVD’s off a HD. My DVD’s uses the native UI so you get the nice fade in/out effects and snappiness from the interface which is something the plug-ins cannot do hence the reason some may prefer it.

How it works under “normal circumstances” is you would plug in a DVD changer and load in your discs as My DVD's is primarily intended for the North American market it would then pull down the metadata containing the thumbnail, synopsis and details of the movie. Each DVD has a unique ID which is queried by the built in service to AMG which will then get the info but the DVD ID's catalogued are almost entirely region 1 DVD's from North America our region 2 discs have different ID's so no way to acquire the metadata.

Of course that was till someone cooked up a little application that does the business for you by remapping invalid DVD ID’s to valid ones from the AMG service : )

One other thing as My DVD's only works with DVD's in their original form (VOB files) you will need a lot of storage space for your collection depending on the size - consider it a good excuse to go out and buy one of those 750GB hard drives if you plan to make use of this : )

Oh yeah and time, to rip the DVD I would strongly recommend a DVD drive that does not have a rip lock either through a firmware patch or a drive that simply doesn’t bother with one like the BenQ 1650.


Getting started;
How to enable My DVD’s simple download this zip file in this link right click on the "Showgallery.reg" file and select merge – the other one will revert back the changes and hide My DVD’s from view again.

Next step is to transfer your DVD’s to your PC I would recommend DVD Decrypter (In file mode) or DVDFab Decrypter to do this. It does not matter were the DVDs are stored it can be anywhere even a shared folder over the network as long as they follow this layout – example movie Back To The Future;

\Back To The Future\VIDEO_TS <– with the VIDEO_TS folder actually containing the files from the decrypted DVD.

So for instance you could have C:\My Collection\Back To The Future\VIDEO_TS

Putting the correct name of the movie in the parent folder title will also be of benefit later on.

Once you have transferred your DVD’s to the PC start MCE and go into the My Videos and run the add folder wizard, now add the folder or folders containing your movies so they are listed as this is what makes them show up under My DVD’s but at the moment without any metadata, also I would recommend adding the top level folder like My Collection so it saves you a lot of hassle.


Metadata time;
Now for adding the prized metadata this is fairly easy now as you can make use of the AMG metadata courtesy of the “extended meta-services for MCE” application (requires internet connection). It works by scanning the selected folders storing your DVD’s and will list them according to the name of the parent folder which is why it was a good idea to name them correctly as this program also uses that folder name to do its initial search for metadata so wrong name means retyping the name to search for metadata (you can refine the search if you get no matches).

Click on a DVD title of your choosing, it will pop up a display with a listing at the top saying this disc does not have a valid ID click here to add one, do so. It will then begin searching for valid matches for metadata the top most one is the AMG one so most times you want to go for that as a good match. But the AMG service is not 100% proof so the other places to acquire metadata from like IMDB or custom which is stuff uploaded by users are useful in this case.

When happy press okay and it will load the data along with the thumbnail and you can review it to your liking, if not pick another DVD-ID or simply close the window and the metadata is saved & that’s all there is to it (repeat as necessary for your entire collection).

Close the program and start MCE, go into My DVD’s and you should now see your title with the thumbnail display and the associated metadata.





A few final notes;
You can edit any of the metadata pulled down by the extended meta-services for MCE program and save it as a custom .xml file for use with My DVD’s.

You can also over-ride the default thumbnail if not to your liking although I have observed one or two titles that refused to use the new folder.jpg so I suspect a cache issue. You place the folder.jpg which is the new DVD cover thumbnail in the \Back To The Future\ folder not the VIDEO_TS folder. You can also use the extended meta-services for MCE program to change the thumbnail.

Often the name of the movie pulled down from the metadata service like AMG is something like Pirates of the Caribbean [WS] WS=Widescreen Edition, you can edit this in the program or by going into MCE and into the movie title and select edit and it will allow you to change the title. Strangely I cannot figure out how to un-select the entire text as pressing any key on the keyboard deletes the entire title so you have to re-type the entire thing which is quite annoying.

The extended meta-services for MCE program can be a little flakey with network shares but it does work just make sure you set the shared folder to be allowed to be written to as it has to dump its XML file in the shared DVD folders.

You might see references else where to DVD profiler and exporting its database of DVD ID’s to import into My DVD’s via the My DVD Settings program well I tried it and did a collection of around 30 DVD’s all with North American ID’s & not one worked for me, now I could have done it wrong but I believe I followed the instructions correctly but in my own opinion the extended meta services is so much quicker & easier to use.

My DVD’s does not support multiple discs titles so one entry per disc is all that’s allowed which means for episodic DVD’s you will need to have an entry for each disc in the box set.

Enjoy!

SouperComputer

excellent post 8T8, added to key posts for future reference.

unklerosco

This is exactly what i was looking for... Now all i need is a case to build a HTPC..

Cheers..