My Movies 2 - Watch DVDs In Windows Media Center


My Movies MCE Addon

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.

My Movies MCE Addon

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.

My Movies Collection Management

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!

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 8 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Why media center prevents DVD access is beyond me. It’s like Durex selling condoms but saying its only for self-pleasuring and not intercourse.

    Odd!

  2. #2

    lol nice idea marcus. But indeed, this is odd :/

  3. #3

    Wow! One item that I must for this new year. Thanks buddy for informing :)

  4. #4

    Odd… my vista media center lets me watch dvds…

    it’s the standard software that came on the installer. Hmmm

  5. #5

    You can watch DVD’s on your WMC. Rip the movies to your hard drive (AUDIO_TS & VIDEO_TS) and then add a picture of the DVD cover and call it folder.jpg. These 3 items need to be in one folder with the name of the movie and you are set. Be sure to change the registry to show gallery and not play. There are other posts on how to do this. Enjoy!

  6. #6

    Ah. You just saved me the trouble. Thanks mate

  7. #7

    Nice idea, but I have too many extra programs already. :)

  8. #8

    This thing bombs out every time I try to copy a dvd to the hard drive.

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