Vista Media Center doesn’t allow you to watch DVDs on your hard drive. There is a way to hack the registry so that a DVD Library is added to Vista Media Center, but only a list of movies is displayed with no thumbnails or data like genres, movie ratings, actor bios etc.
I discovered My Movies 2 yesterday and it’s a brilliant free addon if you are a Media Center user like me. Once installed My Movies 2 allows you to index your movies with automatically downloaded data from the My Movies WebService, and then browse movies, actors, directors and much more.
The program is very easy to setup. All you have to do is download the relevant version and install it, and My Movies adds itself automatically to the MCE interface. My Movies 2 will then automatically add movie information based on either the folders you’ve added to your MCE library, or by manually adding the folders where you’ve stored your movies.
It does a very good job of automatically finding movie details. If mistakes are made or if a match can’t be made, then the brilliant Collection Management tool makes it a doddle to find movie details to add to the database. Once this has been done, you are left with a very rich DVD library inferface within MCE.
One very nice feature is that the service works with Windows Home Server, so you can have one database stored on your WHS box that all your various machines can access. To do this I installed the Client/Server version of My Movies 2 on my WHS box (you may have to add SQL Server Express to the firewall exceptions) and then installed the Client versions on my Vista MCE machines.
My Movies 2 is a great application and a must-have if you user MCE to watch your DVDs. Best of all, it’s free!
