I recently received an e-mail about DVDxml.com a site for you dvdid.xml freaks.

Since the launch of Rollup 2, it is possible to enable “My DVDs” in Windows XP Media Center Edition. This feature allows you to copy, catalog and play your DVDs from your hard drive. It was also discovered by Matt Goyer that you could use a single dvdid.xml file, about 150 bytes, to have Media Center automatically download movie information and cover art. Information such as movie title, year, actors, genre, rating, length, director, description and more!

Heh. It wasn’t really ‘discovered’ by me. I was the program manager who wrote the spec in collaboration with the developers, David and Hugh. And I will say that we definitely sat around building 50 dreaming that if we created a open xml file and blogged abou tit then the community would build something like this site, we’re glad you did! We also fixed that bug with the synopsis not loading in Vista.

DVDxml.com was created so that you don’t have to make your own dvdid.xml files anymore. All you have to do is come here and download the dvdid.xml file you need. We maintain the most complete (and currently only) database of dvdid.xml files.

Good stuff!

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Chris wishes MCE a happy fourth birthday and posts this fun infographic:

Ah Media Center… We have been through a lot together :), always lots of ups and down. Unfortunately today marks a down day; I have a very recent build of MCE running at home and it’s crashing on average two times for every hour of ATSC DVR-MS playback. Not very confidence inspiring!

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Someone wants to tweak the background color of closed captioning.

Lazy web request: I’m fairly certain there are registry tweaks for the closed captioning dialogs. I no longer have access to the e-mail from the program manager who knew about this and told me how to do it (and he’s no longer with the group). But if you poke around the registry you may be able to figure it out.

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