What does My DVDs look like?
On Friday, we launched Media Center Update Rollup 2. With the rollup you can now connect a DVD changer/jukebox to MCE. For devices such as the Sony XL1 and the PowerFile R200DL this support is plug and play. For other devices, if they implement the MediumChanger interface and install the appropriate driver they will also work with Media Center. Or if you don’t have a changer you can enable this functionality for locally stored DVDs (more on that later). So what does the feature look like?
Assuming we recognize your changer, we change the Play DVD item on the Media Center start menu to My DVDs:
Once you have a few discs loaded into the changer (on the current changers it takes about 1 minute to scan each disc inserted) My DVDs looks like this:
It looks and behaves very much like the other MCE galleries:
- Pivots on the left
- Context menu for each item
- Triple tap support
Here’s what the context menu looks like:
If you click through to a movie you get the Movie Info page:
You get information like, the director, cast, rating, genre, theatrical release year, synopsis and larger cover art.
If you need to edit the title, because it’s wrong, or we were unable to identify the disc, click ‘Edit Title’:
If you go back up to the My DVDs gallery, or to More Programs you can access Manage Discs which gives you a view of all the optical media in your changer enabling you to eject it or load it.
Upcoming posts on the changer:
- How to display locally stored DVDs in My DVDs with rich metadata
- My DVDs as a platform for software developers
- Where are we going with My DVDs in Vista
Hi Matt,
may be I can’t see the tree in the middle of a forest, but I’m struggling with something w.r.t. my DVD that really causes me some headache. I just got the new Sony XL1 incl. the changer and I just love the my DVD feature!
However, it just happens, that about 90% of my DVDs are region 2, so I’ve set the changer drive to that region. Works just fine for playing the DVDs. The only thing that bothers me is that I can’t seem to get the DVD metadata (mostly the coverpics) show up in my DVD. I browsed through several forums and blogs and found some more or less comfortable ways to create the XML metafiles for the DVD-ids in the changer. Basically, what I do is to manually add whatever data is missing in the DVDInfocache directory. BUT: where would I store the cover pic and what would be the nomenclature for the file name? I suppose there’s no easy way to just “tell” myDVD to retrieve the DVD metadata from a different (i.e. European) source (ideally on a case-by-case basis)?
Any advise on that would be highly appreciated!
Thanks,
Jan
Hi Jan, I’m sorry but I don’t believe it’s possible for you to specify cover art for a region 2 DVD if it isn’t recognized by My DVDs. This is something I’ll see if we can fix for Vista.
Don’t know if you check comments on old posts, but how do you get the screen shots from MCE like that? I want to make a couple of my DVD collection but I don’t know how!
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