Looking at TV Series DVD rips (VIDEO_TS) in XBMC

If you have ever tried to add TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders or .ISO images in to the XBMC TV Shows Library, then you know its not easy. Generally XBMC does not support this and the general consensus on the XBMC forums seems to be to re-encode all your DVDs and create individual episode VIDEO files like .avi or .mkv. This is obviously allot of work to do, so I have been looking at other possibilities.

I did try adding TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders back in XBMC V11 Eden, you can read about that here. What I found is that if I added a new SMB source to point to my TV – DVD folders on my WHS server and selected TheTVDB scraper in XBMC it would add an entry for that TV Series in the XBMC TV Shows Library as seen in the first screen shot below, however when you clicked in to it I was unable to start the playback of the DVD as seen in the second screen shot below.

XBMC Eden – TV Shows Library (Pokoyo DVD rip)



Unable to play the TV Series from the XBMC TV Shows Library, no episode information present.



However when using the XBMC Video files area instead of the TV Show Library, I could browse to the Disk1 folder, if I right clicked this and selected Play the DVD would play fine.



I recently tried adding TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders again in to XBMC V12 Frodo and similar behaviour as above was exhibited and again I was unable to play the DVD disc from the XBMC TV Shows Library.

Someone on the XBMC forums then kindly pointed me to a hack / workaround. Which you can see here. There is also a Wiki page here which explains more about it.

The hack is a two part deal, I had to edit my XBMC advancedsettings.xml file in my user directory and add this section:

And I had to rename the Disc folders on my WHS server, below is an example of how my folder structure was previously setup for the Planet of the Apes TV series.

It is the Disc folders in bold I had to rename.

\\Server
         \TV
             \DVD
                   \Planet of The Apes
                                              \Disk1
                                                       \VIDEO_TS
                                               \Disk2
                                                        \VIDEO_TS
                                                \Disk3
                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                                 \Disk4
                                                         \VIDEO_TS

Below you can see my renamed folder structure. Disk1 contains episodes 1-4, Disk2 contains episodes 5-8, Disk3 contains episodes 9-12 and Disk4 contains episodes 13-14.

\\Server
          \TV
             \DVD
                  \Planet of The Apes
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E01E02E03E04
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E05E06E07E08
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E09E10E11E12
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E13E14
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS

The name of the TV Series is critical, for example Planet of the Apes.S01.E01E02E03E04 the name of the TV show in red must match identically with the name of this TV show as in TheTVDB.com database website.

I initially had my folders named like this:- Planet of The Apes The Complete TV Series.S01.E01E02E03E04 and this didn’t work TheTVDB scraper in XBMC did not add any episodes.

So once you have your new folder structure setup with the renamed Disc folders, you can try and add this TV Series in to the XBMC TV Shows Library. If its already present in the library? You need to remove it and re-add it.

Your TV Series should then look like this in the XBMC TV Show Library. You can see each episode is correctly listed with the episode number and the episode title.



If you select Show Information on episode 1 you can see that it has the correct synopsis / description



If you select Show Information on episode 2 you can see that it has a different synopsis / description relating to that particular episode.



Playing the DVD Disc

Now this is where it falls down when compared to Windows Media Center and My Movies. As we know episodes 1-4 are on Disc1. If you click to play any of the episodes 1-4, DVD playback will be started, but it does not start the playback directly of the episode you selected. It simply starts the playback of the DVD and you will have to then manually select which episode you wish to watch from the DVD’s title menu. Also all four episodes 1-4 will be marked as watched (The tick) even if you just clicked to play episode 1.

If I selected to play episode 5 the DVD Disc 2 would be played, as we already established episode 5 is on Disc2.



Here you can see the DVD Disc1 title menu and this is where I have to select which episode I want to watch.



 Short comings and issues

This is clearly not as good as My Movies in Windows Media Center, because My Movies have something called TV Episode Disc mapping, you can see how this is handled in My Movies in their tutorial video here, which shows the process of mapping chapters and titles on the DVD disc to the correct episode numbers.

From the My Movies website:-

“For TV Series on DVD to be displayed correctly in the tv series library, the episodes of the DVD must be mapped to the title and chapter structure of the disc. In this video, you will see how to map the episodes of the disc to the structure, by using the Collection Management program and Windows Media Player, allowing the DVD to be supported for the TV Series functionality.”

So when I click on an episode in My Movies / Windows Media Center that episode is actually played directly and I never have to use the DVD Discs title menu and manually select the episode I want to watch.

It is extremely unlikely that this episode mapping functionality will be added in to XBMC, as it is geared up for TV Series in VIDEO files and not on DVD discs.

So you may decide this solution I have just demonstrated is not good enough, if you want to click play on an episode within XBMC and for it to play directly, you have two other options as far as I can see it:

1. Re-encode all your TV Series DVD discs and split out each episode in to an individual episode VIDEO file like a .avi or .mkv, this would be very time consuming on large collections.

2. Download your TV Series again from the Internet, how you do that and if its legal is up to you? But it could be quicker to simply download the TV Series so they are in individual VIDEO files which XBMC works well with and to remove your TV Series DVD rips from your server!!

My Movies.dk metadata for XBMC

Note: Regular XBMC users who are not also using MyMovies.dk you can ignore this next bit. 

I am still using My Movies database for metadata on my WHS server and I use the My Movies Collection Management program to edit and update titles in my collection. Now My Movies also has some short comings with XBMC. It is true that My Movies supports creating metadata aka .nfo and .tbn files for Movies so you can also add these titles in to the XBMC Movie Library. This generally works well. BUT My Movies does not currently support metadata for XBMC for TV Series.

This  is not a massive issue for TV Series that are in VIDEO files, as you can simply use the inbuilt TheTVDB scraper in XBMC and all is well.

But there is an issue with My Movies and TV Series DVD Disc titles in Collection Management. So what’s the problem?

When you enable metadata creation for XBMC in the My Movies settings, for some reason for TV Series that are DVD Disc titles, Collection Management creates a movie.nfo and movie.tbn file. It does not do this for my TV Series that are in VIDEO files so they are displayed OK in XBMC TV Shows Library, it only creates these .nfo files in the VIDEO_TS folders of my TV Series DVD rips. This has a bad affect in XBMC.

Here is an example of a movie.nfo file created by My Movies for this TV Series on DVD rip.

If you look at the <title> its called “Planet of The Apes: The Complete TV Series” and the synopsis reads as:

“It changed the face of television forever.
Based on the enormously popular and successful Planet Of The Apes movies, the 1974 TV series has become a true cult classic. Now all the 14 episodes (in...</outline>
<plot>It changed the face of television forever.
Based on the enormously popular and successful Planet Of The Apes movies, the 1974 TV series has become a true cult classic. Now all the 14 episodes (including "The Liberator", which never aired during the show's original run) have been compiled and are available to own for the first time.
After their spacecraft travels through a time warp, two astronauts (Ron Harper, James Naughton) from 1981 crash-land back on Earth in the year 3085 - a time when intelligent apes rule and humans have been reduced to servants or pets. Captured by the apes and sentenced to death, they are saved by a curious chimpanzee named Galen (Roddy McDowall). But now all three are on the run, trying to keep one step ahead of the gorilla army led by General Urko (Mark Lenard), who is determined to kill the renegades.“

Now because of the presence of this movie.nfo file created by My Movies it has a negative affect in XBMC. You can see now that all the episodes have “Planet of The Apes: The Complete TV Series” in the title, rather than their individual titles, as shown in the previous screen shot above.



Also each episode having its own unique synopsis / description is now lost and all the episodes have the same generic synopsis as in the movie.nfo file.

Episode 1



Episode 2



Episodes 1 & 2 have the same synopsis as do all the episodes.

I’m not sure I even need these movie.nfo files that My Movies creates, as when I removed them the Planets of the Apes series looked correct in both Windows Media Center and in XBMC. The problem is Collection Management / My Movies for WHS will automatically regenerate these movie.nfo files for TV Series that are DVD Disc titles, so unfortunately the My Movies developers will have to look in to this and they have no plans in the near future to look at their XBMC integration again. What I think we need is a settings option to stop the creation of these movie.nfo files and related files like movie.tbn for TV Series DVD Disc titles.

Final Thoughts

I am quite pleased with this hack / workaround for XBMC and if it wasn’t for this issue with My Movies and these movie.nfo files, I think this would be my preferred final solution.

Getting TV Series DVD rips to be displayed correctly in the XBMC TV Shows library has always been difficult and now I finally have a possible solution, I have hit a bit of a wall with the My Movies back-end system. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future at some point, fingers crossed.

Standard MCE remote control - DVD button to launch My Movies!

I’ve wanted to be able to do this for along time but never figured it out and then I switched to using Logitech Harmony universal remote controls. But I had a requirement this week to be able to press the DVD button on a standard MCE remote control and for My Movies to be launched and not the native 7MC Movie Library.

There are probably many ways you can do this using programs such as Girder, Intelliremote, Eventghost, LM Remote KeyMap, ControlRemote to name a few.

However I wanted to just edit the registry to change the functionality of the remote controls DVD button and to use AutoHotKey which I am already using on the HTPC.

So if you want to do this, its a two stage process, first you need to edit the registry and change the DVD button to use a different keyboard command. By default Ctrl+Shift+M launches the native Movie Library. I wanted to change this so that Ctrl+Alt+M would be used. Secondly you need a small AutoHotkey script that detects Ctrl+Alt+M and launches the My Movies entry point in Media Center.

Editing the registry:

Open regedit and navigate to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da

Right click 745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da and select Export from the menu.

Save it as HIDIR.reg

Right click 745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da again and export again and save a second copy as HIDIR-Modified.reg

Now find where you saved HIDIR-Modified.reg right click it and select edit. It will then open in notepad.

Scroll down to the end of the file and add:

,24,00,00,00,04,05,\
10

The Report Mapping Table should look like the below, I’ve marked in bold the code we added.

"ReportMappingTable"=hex:01,00,00,00,04,00,1e,02,00,00,00,04,00,1f,03,00,00,00,\
04,00,20,04,00,00,00,04,00,21,05,00,00,00,04,00,22,06,00,00,00,04,00,23,07,\
00,00,00,04,00,24,08,00,00,00,04,00,25,09,00,00,00,04,00,26,00,00,00,00,04,\
00,27,0b,00,00,00,04,00,28,0a,00,00,00,04,00,29,1d,00,00,00,04,02,25,1c,00,\
00,00,04,02,20,1f,00,00,00,04,00,51,1e,00,00,00,04,00,52,21,00,00,00,04,00,\
4f,20,00,00,00,04,00,50,22,00,00,00,04,00,28,4e,00,00,00,01,08,02,0f,00,00,\
00,01,09,02,23,00,00,00,01,24,02,3b,00,00,00,01,04,02,16,00,00,00,01,b0,00,\
18,00,00,00,01,b1,00,17,00,00,00,01,b2,00,14,00,00,00,01,b3,00,15,00,00,00,\
01,b4,00,1a,00,00,00,01,b5,00,1b,00,00,00,01,b6,00,19,00,00,00,01,b7,00,6e,\
00,00,00,01,cd,00,10,00,00,00,01,e9,00,11,00,00,00,01,ea,00,0e,00,00,00,01,\
e2,00,26,00,00,00,01,8d,00,12,00,00,00,01,9c,00,13,00,00,00,01,9d,00,0c,00,\
00,00,03,82,00,29,00,00,00,03,83,00,2a,00,00,00,03,82,00,24,00,00,00,04,05,\
10

Save the HIDIR-Modified.reg file and then double click it to load it back in to the registry.

Or you can download my already edited HIDIR-Modified.reg file from my Sky Drive here.

Add the AutoHotKey script:

If your not already using AutoHotKey you will need to download and install from here. When you install it, it asks you if you want to create a sample script file in your Documents folder say yes.

You should have a green icon with a H on it in your system tray, if not find AutoHotKey from the start menu and click on it, then in the system tray right click the AutoHotKey icon and select Edit script.

Paste the below code in to the end of the file:

^!m::
IfWinExist Untitled - My Movies
WinActivate
else
Run %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /entrypoint:{8984aed5-7c9d-42f0-b2ad-c39bbcf04a25}\{810d7b87-1300-4aed-a700-1c6179f8f14b}
return

Save the AutoHotKey.ahk file and ensure you add AutoHotKey in to the Windows Startup folder so AutoHotkey runs at startup. Then reboot the PC.

Now when you press the DVD button on your standard MCE remote control the My Movies – Movie Library should be opened and not the native 7MC Movie Library !

If you need to restore your registry back to how it was before you started just double click on HIDIR.reg that you created in the first step.

More details can be found on The Green Button here

My Movies for iPhone Pro & iPad Updated v1.60

You can read more about My Movies for iPhone here

- Adds Parental Controls

- Adds Twitter Integration

- Graphical Updates (Splash Screen, Icon, Welcome Page and more)

- Fixes Various Issues

Update: My Movies for iPad has also been updated:

- Adds Barcode Scanning on iPad 2.

- Adds Parental Controls.

- Adds Twitter Integration.

- Adds Dutch, Norwegian and Russian language.

- Graphical Updates (Splash Screen, Icon, Welcome Page and more)

- Fixes various issues.

You can read more about My Movies for iPad here

My Movies for iPad - controlling My Movies for Windows Media Center

Brian Binnerup of My Movies has released a new YouTube video of My Movies for iPad in action controlling Windows Media Center.

I have to say the remote control looks very impressive indeed! You can control multiple Windows Media Center PC’s and 5 Windows Media Center Extenders per PC.

Watch the demo video:

My Movies for iPad–Control Media Center

Learn more about My Movies for iPad on the My Movies website here.

 

www.phaze1digital.com

How to launch 3rd Party MCE add-in with a Logitech Harmony remote

Following up on my recent post entitled How to launch Media Center directly in to a 3rd party app, I’ve been looking at how to launch My Movies and RadioTime MCE using a Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote control.

Searching on the internet it seems some people on Vista Media Center were using macros to move the cursor up / down, left /right on the MCE menu to click on the My Movies icon, which is not ideal and wouldn’t work on 7mc anyways.

Others were using software such as Intelliremote or ControlRemote however I did not want any additional software installed and running in order to achieve this.

So I have used a keyboard shortcut method, however there is one issue with this, you need a Microsoft MCE 2005 IR keyboard to teach the Harmony the IR codes of the keyboard shortcuts. Luckily for me I had one of these MCE keyboards kicking about the place.

First thing I did was to create two new shortcuts for Windows Media Center one to launch My Movies and the other to launch RadioTimeMCE. I used the method I described in my last post here to create these shortcuts. I didn’t want them on the desktop so I created a folder in my Start Menu called MCE Custom Shortcuts.

In this folder are my two Media Center shortcuts:

Windows Media Center – My Movies

Target: %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /entrypoint:{8984aed5-7c9d-42f0-b2ad-c39bbcf04a25}\{810d7b87-1300-4aed-a700-1c6179f8f14b}

Windows Media Center – RadioTime MCE

Target: %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /entrypoint:{4c36cf23-bf48-4f93-86c5-78009734d21a}\{4c36cf23-bf48-4f93-86c5-78009734d21b}

Now we need to assign some keyboard shortcuts to these Windows Media Center shortcut icons.

Note: Important, only create your keyboard shortcut key after you have moved the custom shortcuts to the start menu. As the first time I created the icons on the desktop, then set the keyboard shortcut keys and then moved them from the desktop to the start menu, however I found the keyboard shortcuts then did not work so I had to remove them and add them again.

Creating the keyboard shortcut keys:

Right click on the first Windows Media Center shortcut from the start menu as shown above in this case the My Movies one. Select properties from the menu.

Click in to the Shortcut key field with your mouse and then enter a key combination on the keyboard. You can probably use any thing you like here I used Ctrl + Alt + M

Click Apply and then OK.

Now repeat this process for any other icons you are setting up, in this case the RadioTime MCE one.

For this one I used Ctrl + Alt + R

Test that they work by entering the newly created Keyboard shortcut keys and ensure Media Center is launched into the correct 3rd party add-in.

Ok now our Media Center PC is configured we need to use the MCE 2005 IR keyboard and the Harmony software.

I am presuming your have already added your Media Center PC so just click the Learn IR button under the Media Center PC device.

Click for larger image

Scroll down to the bottom of the list and in the Learn a New Command type “My Movies” and then click the Learn New Command button.

Click for larger image

Now this is where the MCE 2005 IR keyboard comes in to play, line it up with the Harmony remote control and then enter the keyboard shortcut key you setup earlier on the Media Center PC. In this case it was Ctrl + Alt + M

It should then say Key Detected, the Harmony software will ask you to confirm this key again and hopefully after that it has learnt the new IR code.

Click for larger image

Click for larger image

Once you have successfully learnt the IR code repeat the process for any other shortcuts you are setting up, in my case I got the Harmony to learn another command called RadioTime using the Ctrl + Alt + R keyboard shortcut key.

Finish the wizard and click Done

Now you need to assign your new commands, in the Harmony software go back to the Device tab and click the Settings button on the Media Center PC device. Then select Adjust Inputs from the list and click Next.

On this screen I chose to delete the My DVDs and Radio inputs as these are for the inbuilt DVD / Movie Library and Radio area’s of Media Center which I won’t be using.

I then added two new inputs one called “My Movies” and one called RadioTime”

Click for larger image

On this next screen you assign the new inputs to your newly created commands that will now appear in the drop down list.

Assigning My Movies input to the My Movies command

Click for larger image

Assigning RadioTime input to the RadioTime command

Click for larger image

Finish the wizard and click Done.

Now save the changes to the remote control.

On my model the Harmony 550, I click the Devices button on the remote control, select Media Center and I can then scroll through the pages on the screen and see the new options My Movies and Radio time, when I press either one Media Center is launched in to the correct 3rd party application. Job done!

In addition you could assign your new commands to a custom button such as A or B for example.

Summary

I think this wasn’t such a bad way to set this up as you don’t need to install any additional software, the only downside is you need an MCE 2005 IR keyboard which you might not currently have.

Next I need to figure out how to change the page layout and item order that shows up on the remote controls LCD screen and bring my new entries to the first page.

My Movies 3.0 – It’s finished!

My Movies 3.0 is done and dusted it’s shipped already to the custom installers yesterday and is due for public release on October 22nd.

I was involved with the beta testing and if you haven’t seen me on the Green Button forums for a while, I’ve been hanging out over at the My Movies forums for the last few weeks instead.

Congratulations to Brian the developer of My Movies, I think we are all very pleased with how My Movies 3.0 has shaped up and he’s not finished yet, the development cycle will continue with My Movies 3.1 or 3.5 on the horizon. So lets hope our wish list items make it!

Part 2: My Movies for Windows Home Server

In part one we looked at the My Movies for WHS installation and configuration, now we need to install the My Movies client software on your VMC PC so you can manage your movie collection.

You can download the My Movies Client from the download page here.

Make sure you get the My Movies Client Edition for either x86 or x64 and not the My Movies Server and Client Edition.

My Movies Client installation

Once you have installed the software launch the My Movies Collection Management program. You should be prompted to enter the server name you want to connect to. Enter the name of your WHS box.

Note: I already had the My Movies Server and Client Edition installed on my Vista PC, so first I had to remove it from add/remove programs, I also removed all the MS SQL components as these were no longer required as they are now hosted on the WHS. And then just installed the My Movies Client Edition.

Once in the Collection Management program, my movie titles were then all listed on the left hand side. If you are doing a refresh installation with no previous database having been restored then you will see no titles listed here until some new ones have been added.

Setup Folder Monitoring

Select the Configure menu and then Options. Select Folder Monitoring. In here you add the paths to the folders you would like My Movies to Monitor.

Also select an Operating Type and Operating Location. I personally normally choose Confirmative in Collection Manager. But you may want the notifications to appear in Media Center when new titles are added, so you would change the Operating Location to Media Center.

My Movies will then auto detect the movies in the monitored folders and try it’s best to add a matching title in to the database.

I find that it is not always 100% accurate which is why I set it to Confirmative, so it asks me first before just adding an incorrect title.

I will now briefly run through adding a new movie title manually, you may do this if you are not using folder monitoring or you want to add titles for some of your movies that have not been detected.

Click the Title pull down menu and select Add Title or just click the Add Titles button the menu bar.

Go to the By Title tab enter the name of the movie or if you have the original disk you could use the By Barcode tab, select the country, I normally leave it on United States and select the type, DVD or Blu-ray etc. Then click on the search button.

Choose a title from the search results and click Add Online

Then browse to the folder where this movie is stored.

Once it has been added click Add to Owned for keeps button.

Note: I always use UNC paths rather than local ones like D:\Movies

For example: \\WHS\\Movies\HD\Gladiator

The Progress is then shown as My Movies downloads the information and adds the title to your database.

The title is then added.

Tip: Click the Disc(s) button you may find it has added more than one disk if the movie was listed as a two disk edition, when you only wanted one as you don’t have the second disk on your system. You can simply remove the second disk and save the title.

My Movies in Media Center

This is the My Movies version 2 user interface in Media Center, it is looking dated now as it’s HTML based and not a native MCML Media Center application, especially when compared to the likes of Media Browser.

However I am hoping that the new My Movies version 3 due for beta release in September, will be a suitable replacement to Media Browser as it goes commercial, I know I would prefer to use My Movies if I can.

Disk ripping process on the WHS

Audio CD’s:

After installing AnyDVD HD on the WHS, I inserted an Audio CD. I could see that the light on the DVD Drive was flashing away and I could hear it had spun up. After a few minutes the CD was ejected.

On my PC, I then browsed to the folder I had told My Movies for WHS to rip my audio CD’s to and in there I could see that it had created a folder for this artist with a sub folder with the albums name. In here I had WMA files and even a 500x500 resolution folder.jpg for the front cover sweet! This particular CD was 171 MB in file size that’s using WMA Lossless.

I then went in to my music library in Media Center but I could not see the new album. So I opened WMP11 and refreshed the library to add the album. My newly ripped album then appeared in WMP11/VMC. Man that was pretty simple. I guess if I was more patient the album would have eventually just appeared in Media Center of it’s own accord.

My Music Disc Copier in the WHS Console - Completed rip status Done.

DVD / Blu-ray / HDDVD:

I then dug out a DVD movie (The Big Lebowski) and inserted the disk in to the DVD drive on the WHS machine.

In the WHS Console you can go to the My Movies Disc Copier to see what’s happening.

I have to say I am pretty impressed with the ripping features in My Movies for WHS, I won’t be able to test a Blu-ray disk however as I don’t have a Blu-ray drive on the WHS box. But it makes it very easy for any family member to insert a disk in to the WHS and add it to the collection and for it to appear in Media Center.

Two things I would like to see however, support for ripping DVD’s to DVR-MS and the option to specify individual shared folders for DVD and Blu-ray. Rather than only being able to choose one folder for both.

Summary

I really like My Movies for Windows Home Server. I think if you already have a WHS in the house and you are also a Media Center user, it seems a no brainer to also have the My Movies database installed on the WHS for central access by all HTPC clients and to also take advantage of those easy to use ripping features. So simple anyone in the house can add content to the system.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse”, Media Center”, Story”, My Movies for Windows Home Server”

Part1: My Movies for Windows Home Server

I recently decided to check out My Movies for Windows Home Server, in part one we will look at the installation and configuration.

If you have a WHS on your home network, it is the logical place to install your My Movies database and then your Windows Media Center PC clients can access this centrally stored information.

My Movies can be used to get rich metadata for your movie collection, there is a large online database and most titles can be found in there. Using My Movies is an easy way to get front covers, synopsis and actor information and more for each of your movie titles.

You can use My Movies own Media Center user interface to browse and play your movies, or you can use other third party plug-ins such as Media Browser and Open Media Library.

You can download My Movies for Windows Home Server here

Installation is easy just follow the wiki guide here

Once you have My Movies for Windows Home Server installed you need to configure it. This is also covered in the wiki guide.

If you don’t have a My Movies user account you will need to create one by registering on the My Movies forums here.

Below you can see some of the configuration options I setup.

The default country is United States, I also selected the option get data from the USA or UK if data isn’t found for your country.

I also selected Automatically create database backups, this will backup your My Movies database to a file in case you have any database issues later and you need to restore.

The default path is in the Software shared folder on the WHS.

My Movies Disc Copier

The disc copy service is not available in the free version of My Movies for Windows Home Server. This enables users to copy DVD’s, HD-DVD, Blu-ray and Audio CD’s simply by inserting a disk in to the Optical drive on the Windows Home Server.

You can however earn this feature if you have 1250 points. Contributor points are awarded by the My Movies service, for titles and information you add to the online database using the My Movies Collection Management program.

Alternatively you can purchase My Movies from an authorised dealer.

Note: if you wish to copy protected disks to your WHS then you will also need AnyDVD / AnyDVD HD installed on the server.

After installing a My Movies for Windows Home Server licence file, this option is then enabled.

Now you can select the format you want to rip the disc’s to?

DVD Target Format:

• ISO File
• VIDEO_TS Folder
• MPEG-2 File
• VIDEO_TS Folder and MPEG2 File

Blu-ray and HD DVD Target Format:

1. ISO File
2. BDMV or HDDVD Folder

I would rather see a DVR-MS option on the DVD Target Format over MPEG-2, as the FFWD/Skip works better on DVR-MS files on Media Center Extenders. But I have been told the developers are thinking about adding support for DVR-MS in the future, lets hope they do!

However as that option is not here, I am going to select MPEG-2 File. For Blu-ray I will use ISO File.

I’m not so sure about the next option. Store on Share. There is only the option to select one folder share. With my current setup my DVD rips and Blu-ray rips are in two different folders. This forces me to lump all my discs rips together in just one folder.

My Movies Meta Data

I’m going to go with the default options here and not change anything.

The main item to note here for Media Center users is that the top option is selected.

Store meta-data for Media Center DVD/Movie library (dvdid.xml files)

My Movies Monitor

Here you can tell My Movies which folders you want it to monitor for movies and which file extensions.

I’ve added in two folders one is my DVD folder the other is the Blu-ray folder. The list of file extensions is comprehensive and I did not need to add anything else in to the list. Don’t forget to hit the Start button!

My Music Disc Copier

This is new to me and something I have not seen before looking at the My Movies WHS add-in. You can rip Audio CD’s in Windows Media Center natively with what Microsoft have provided so it will be interesting to see what this My Movies feature adds to this area.

The service is not started by default.

Target Format options:

• Free Lossless Audio Codec (.Flac)
• MPEG-1 Audio Layer (.MP3)
• Wave (.WAV)
• Windows Media Audio (.WMA)

I’d usually select MP3 but WMA might be a better option because if you click the Configure button you can choose WMA Lossless.

From the Wiki:

“On the tab "My Music Disc Copier", you can choose to start the My Music Disc Copier service. You should also configure which target format you would like the Music Disc Copier to copy to - recommended is Windows Media Audio Lossless, since it does not decrease the audio quality of your music.”

Store on Share: here you select the shared folder where you store your music files.

There is also an option for Additional Mobile Format. With options for MP3 and WMA. I guess if your main music collection was all in Lossless .Flac for example you might use this option to have MP3’s on your mobile device.

Target Directory Name, I was happy with the default variable, other possible variables you can use are shown in yellow.

Target File Name, again I left this with the default variable.

Backup / Restore

I previously had an other Server/Client installation of My Movies on a Vista Media Center PC and I have a good clean database already from that installation, so I exported the data to a backup.mmb file using the My Movies Collection Management program on that PC and then imported it in to the WHS My Movies database using the WHS Console UI.

I don’t need to worry about the file paths being wrong for the movie titles, as they where looking at the WHS Video shared folder anyways using UNC paths \\WHS\Videos\Movies\DVD\Ronin etc, so everything should be good to go.

Obviously if you are starting from a refresh and do not have a previous My Movies database you want to restore, then you won’t need to do this and you will just be starting from a blank database which is created during this setup, which you will then populate with your Movie titles as you rip them to your system.

Summary

In part two we will look at connecting the My Movies Collection Management program to our new My Movies database on the WHS. We will also have a look at some of the features in the Collection Management program and some of the My Movies features in the Media Center user interface.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse”, Media Center”, Story”, My Movies for Windows Home Server”