Hacking Windows7 MediaCenter

While Media Center has no trouble playing back your ripped movies, videos and music there has been no love lost in the between it and TV series DVDs. The Media Browser plug-in for Media Center eases the situation a bit adding support for TV series’ within the plug-in interface. Once it’s in there, however, it still lacks metadata in most cases making it no better than the default video section.

Luckily for those of us with plenty of TV series DVDs there is a simple program to help alleviate the situation. MediaScout will go through the television series folders and track down the metadata for each series and season. Backdrops and posters will be pulled down along with episode information and life will be good again.

The first step to TV series bliss is to download and extract MediaScout somewhere onto your hard drive. Opening up the program by running “MediaScoutGUI.exe” and going to the settings panel we can see some of the options available. The ability to choose the folder where the television series videos are stored, season folder name and what metadata to pull down off the internet. On the right there is even an option to rename the files once episode metadata is found.

One important item of note is that each video filename must contain a season and episode identifier. It can be anywhere in the filename but must be in the format S00E00 for best results. For example, the first show of the second season would need “S02E01” in the filename. This helps MediaScout find the appropriate metadata info for any particular episode. Videos without this information will lack quite a bit of extra metadata content.

To start fetching the data open the “TV” tab at the top and select “Browse” to choose your TV series location. You can choose to either do one series at a time or a whole directory full of different series’. If the directory contains many different series’ they will need to be in a directory structure with the series name on each folder. The box to enable batch processing beneath the browse input will also need checked. Once you have your directory selected simply press “Fetch Data”.

If MediaScout comes across a series title it doesn’t recognize it will prompt you to choose a series from a list. The program will also list the results in the box at the bottom with episodes that are unable to be properly retrieved marked in red for easy identification. Typically these just have a problem with the season/episode tag in the filename.

As long as your directories are setup correctly and each filename has a season/episode tag MediaScout should be able to get plenty of metadata for each series. You can easily check some of the metadata retrieved by MediaScout in the Manage TV tab or simply opening up MediaBrowser in Media Center.

Using the poster and new cover flow views in Media Browser won’t display most of the extra episode information picked up by MediaScout. The thumb and detail views do, however, display the episode description and name quite nicely. With a little bit of elbow work your television series setup can rival even the best of movie collection setups with MediaScout and Media Browser.

While you’re expanding Media Center’s capabilities why not add Weather and Shoutcast Radio, too!

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Tagged As: dvdxml, extras library, media browser, programs, synopsis

Acquiring details for your Media Center’s Movie Library can be difficult.  Built-In support for adding this information is slim and complicated, furthermore it can’t be edited by the end user.  You’re stuck with what you get.  There are a few other options like DVDXml.com,  though searching for all those movies on the DVDXml.com website can get tiring. Fortunately, there is another option: DVD Library Manager.

DVD Library Manager allows you to download movie information from Amazon or IMDB then save the movie details and even cover art to your media center.  Even better, you can edit the information once it has been entered into the system.  Managing your movie information with DVD Library Manager is a snap.

Before using DVD Library Manager, however, you should know that it will only pick up movies with a folder named “Video_TS” inside.  You can add this as a blank folder under each movie folder, for example “C:\Movies\Movie Title\Video_TS”. After using DVD Library Manager, however, you will most likely need to go back and remove this folder from wherever it has been added. An easy way to do this is using the Windows Explorer search box at the top right corner of Windows Explorer.

First, download the latest available version of the program from The Green Button forums right here. Once the program is installed give it an initial run, if your movies are stored in the default Media Center locations you should see a list of movies populate the main view.

If your movies aren’t loaded into the main view you may need to change some settings by clicking the settings tab on the main toolbar. Once inside the settings you will see the default media locations and a second area for adding additional folders.  Add your movie locations and save your settings.

Once you’ve got all your movies listed inside the main interface you’ll want to go through all the incomplete entries and scan for information. Doing this is quite simple, double-click on any incomplete entries to bring up the details view.

Your view will most likely contain missing or incomplete information and may or may not have a cover. To rectify the situation you can scan one of two databases to get new information, Amazon and IMDB. At the time of this article the option for scanning IMDB was not working due most likely to changes in the IMDB site.

Once you’ve found the right title and information for your movie you can make edits to the information either in this window or in the previous window.  To save your new information and return to the details window press “Select Movie”. From the details window you can make any edits you wish or select different cover art from another location. Once you’re happy with the results press the “Save” button on the details toolbar.

Windows 7 Media Center also has the ability to pull down further information from the internet for your movies from inside Media Center.  This function seems to work best when your movie’s title contains no additional information such as “widescreen”, “full screen”, “collectors edition”, etc.

Continue on this way until you’re satisfied with your collection’s details.  Each movie will be saved through the details screen and there is no need to save details again in the main view before exiting.  If you’d like to see cover art in the main view as well there is an option under the advanced tab in the main window that will allow this.

DVD Library Manager is a simple way to automate your DVD collection info gathering.  Though it is still somewhat labor intensive it is slightly easier than DVDXml.com.  Whichever method you choose provides much better results than Media Center. Have fun with your newly detailed and polished Movie Library.

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Tagged As: dvd, dvdxml, movie library, programs, synopsis

Adding that extra information to your native Movie Library inside Windows 7 Media Center is currently a cumbersome process for those of us who don’t have the space to store the entire DVD contents to our hard drives. Most of us prefer to use compression such as AVI, MPG or MKV files to store our DVD files to our hard drives saving us both space and money on storage. The problem this presents inside the Movie Library, however, is we lose all that valuable extra information 7MC pulls down from the internet for DVDs.

There is a solution to this problem though. The solution at the moment can be a bit tedious as there aren’t any software solutions that can be used to scrape the proper information to your hard disk automatically like you could formerly do with My Movies. It seems that for now the information that My Movies pulls down isn’t compatible with Windows 7’s Media Center. There is an alternative source for these valuable XML files but it’s a rough ride if you have a big collection.

The best alternative source for the dvdid.xml files that 7MC uses to pull down this extra information is a website called dvdxml.com. As mentioned, however, using this method is far from a simple processes if you have a large movie collection. At present you have to sign up for dvdxml.com then search their database for your movie titles. After locating your movie in their database you simply download the xml file to the folder your movie is stored in. One thing to note with this method is that your movies should also be stored in separate folders, which is generally good practice anyway.

As mentioned, this process can take quite a while for those of us with larger movie collections but at the present it seems to be the only reliable method to collect the proper dvdid.xml files used by 7MC. Hopefully the future will bring us an application to pull down this information automatically and save us some precious time.

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Tagged As: dvd, dvdxml, movie library, synopsis