Twice today I have been asked which changers work with My DVDs in MCE 2005 UR2. They are:

• Sony XL1 - PC+Changer for $1100 at Amazon
• Sony XL2 - PC+Changer for $2300 at Amazon
• Sony XL1B2 - Standalone changer for $799 from Sony Style
• Niveus Ice Vault - Changer only for $2500
• PowerFile R200DL (requires a firmware update that I don’t believe is publicly available)

No RS-232/serial changers work with My DVDs.

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FYI, someone I know ran into issues with DVDIdle Pro and My DVDs:

Having DVDIdle Pro installed when you insert discs in to the changer causes the unique ID that�s generated to somehow be different than what is generated without the software installed/active. Because of this, none of the discs show up with metadata (beyond the volume ID). Disabling the software and �watching� the disc will cause a new ID to be generated (and xml file created) but it never shows up in My DVDs. The only way to have it show up is to eject the disc and re-insert it.

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I’m the program manager for DVDs and Movies so if you have questions, send them my way.

Two I got recently are…

Q: Is it possible for Media Center to remember the ‘resume’ position of multiple DVDs?

A: No, Media Center only remembers where you left off of your most recent disc. Yes, it would have been great if we could have improved this functionality when we introduced My DVDs so that Media Center would remember the position of any disc you stopped watching, but we had a tight schedule and limited resources and had to focus our attention elsewhere.

Q: Will My DVDs be available on the XBox 360?

A: No. We did not implement the ability to remotely play back a DVD from a MCE to an XBox 360 Extender so it did not make sense to make My DVDs available. I certainly understand how cool it would be if you could put your MCE and full loaded DVD changer in a closest and use XBox 360’s to watch your DVD collection from any room wirelessly but this is something that’s going to have to wait until a future release.

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I received an email the other day asking about the PowerFile C200 and whether or not it works with My DVDs. In short, I’m fairly certain it doesn’t.

Why? While powerfil.sys, the inbox driver which provides support for PowerFile changers, supports the C200, we never tested the C200 with either powerfil.sys or with My DVDs. Instead, we built the My DVDs feature using custom PowerFile R200DL units. These units had only one drive and by the time we were done development changes had been made to the firmware of not just the changer but also the drive. We in fact had to swap out the drives of the units with different ones. I also don’t know if the final firmware we were testing against has ever been publicly released by PowerFile, so if you have a R200DL, it likely will not work with My DVDs. But back to the drive issue, it’s because we only built and tested against single drive units that it is a known issue that we do not have code that can reliably determine which drive to use in a two drive unit.

It’s also worth pointing out that PowerFile’s software uses a custom driver, and not powerfil.sys, which we use. Which is why the C200 and R200 may appear to work identically when tested against PowerFile’s software, but differ when tested against ours.

For the best My DVDs experience I really recommend purchasing a Sony XL1 system. It has the changer that has the latest firmware for both the changer and drive, and has been thoroughly tested by both Sony and Microsoft.

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CNET reviews the Sony VAIO XL1 Digital Living System:

This is a great idea for a living-room system for home-theater buffs. We’ve been waiting for a functional PC-based changer for a long time. Slightly underpowered specs could leave casual users scratching their heads at the occasional lag.

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Was searching through my DVD changer mail archives and found a link to Search for DVD by title. This allows you to search for a DVD by title and find the DVDID in the url of the resulting page.

Cancel that, it doesn’t do what I thought it did. Bummer.

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Green Button member, Gelano, has written an app that will get the CRC64/DVDID for you. This is a useful tool if you’re trying to get local DVDs to show up in My DVDs.

Now’s a good time to talk about DVDIDs hit rates. The DVDID is generated by looking at various parts of a DVD in order to generate a unique identifier. Since DVD studios put out multiple versions of a DVD the bits on the disc can vary, this in turn means each version has a different DVDID. Since one movie can have multiple DVDIDs it makes it harder for us to ensure we have every DVDID mapped to it’s corresponding movie. It’s because of this our US hit rate for DVDIDs is about 80%. Which is actually both really good, and an improvement. When we first started this project it was done around 60% but with a combined effort from our group, the metadata group, AMG, and Sony, we submitted lots of missing DVDIDs and AMG has added lots more. For instance, our group actually hired someone to run a DVDID tool on all the DVDs in our internal DVD library.

So what if your DVD is not being identified? You can submit it to Microsoft.

• Load WMP
• Go to DVD Now Playing
• In the bottom right there should be a generic DVD cover art box and above it a ‘Find DVD Info’ link. Click on the link.
• Follow the steps that the link takes you to

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Looking for more info on CRC64s? I’m not a developer, but I think MSDN refers to CRC64 as DVDID. Here are two links:

• DVDID Attribute
• WM/DVDID
• GetDiscID

Let me know if those are helpful or not.

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How to get locally copied DVDs to show up in My DVDs

Disclaimer: Everything posted below is unsupported. We built and tested My DVDs to work for DVD changers, not local content. That it does, is a nice bonus :).

Assuming you have several locally copied DVDs on your hard drive you can get them to show up in My DVDs and play in Media Center. Here’s the basic method of getting this to work:

1. Enable My DVDs. Load up regedit.exe and find this key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings]. Double click on it and change “ShowGallery”=”Play” to “ShowGallery”=”Gallery”. Alternatively, here’s a little file to do this for you courtsey of Sean, ShowMCEGallery.zip.
2. Copy your DVD to your hard drive. I recommend that when you copy DVDs locally that you select the option to have them chunked at 1 gig and the output should by something of the form c:\my dvds\mattsdvd. Underneath c:\my dvds\mattsdvd you’ll find c:\my dvds\mattsdvd\video_ts and in video_ts you’ll find a video.ifo file in addition to several other files.
3. Get cover art. There are a number of places to find cover art. Once you’ve find the correct cover art drop the cover art in c:\my dvds\mattsdvd\folder.jpg
4. Add folder to My Videos. The My DVDs gallery searches the same path as My Videos so if your DVD is not showing up go to My Videos, press CTRL-D, and go through the Videos Media Discovery wizard and add c:\my dvds.

But wait, what about rich metadata?

If you want rich metadata you need to:

1. Create a mattsdvd.dvdid.xml file. In c:\my dvds\mattsdvd create a file called mattsdvd.dvdid.xml. It’s of the form:
   

   <Disc>
   <Name>Matt’s DVD</Name>
   <ID>00000000|00000000/<ID>
   </Disc>

   Where the 0..0|0..0 is the CRC64 id of the DVD. I’ll dig up more on the CRC64 hash function shortly. But in the meantime, it’s an ID calculated based off the original DVD. If you drop it in the dvdid file we’ll query our metadata provider and pull down the rest of the metadata for you and store it in our DvdInfoCache. If you don’t have it, continue to step 2 where you can create your own rich metadata file in DvdInfoCache.

2. If you don’t have the CRC64, make one up, put it in your dvdid file
3. Create a [CRC64].xml file. In c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\DvdInfoCache create an xml file named 00000000-00000000.xml (or whatever your made up CRC64 is. Instead of posting a sample because it’s rather long, you can download one here for Stephen King’s IT: 7e96a250-1c80bfc9.xml.

As you can see, this is not super straightforward, because to re-iterate, My DVDs is for folks with DVD changers. However, I totally expect a savy community member to take the above info and build a plugin which will automate the process of creating these XML files.

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CE Pro, Sony’s MCE-based Digital Living System: Right Product, Wrong Channel. Apparently the XL1 will only be available at retail and won’t be availble through Sony’s Custom Integration sales market line.

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