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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CEPro, First Install! Sony Vaio XL1B2 DVD Changer with 3rd-Party MCE:

But the best feature was the compatible 200-disc DVD changer with seamless MCE integration.

Julie talks to Kevin Buchanan about his experience with a standalone Sony XL1B2 changer and I’m glad to hear that they think the DVD changer is the best feature of MCE 2005 UR2!

…I agree the My DVDs and My Changer menu items are a little confusing. The My DVDs is a Media Center category, and My Changer is Sony’s category. To simplify things we were going to implement a navigateToPage function so that the My Changer category could link to My DVDs, but we ran out of time.

I’m a little baffled about the hard drive expandability issue. You should be able to swap out the two 160GB drive and put in up to three 500 GB drives which would give you more than enough internal storage (because the unit has 3 internal 3.5″ drive bays). And likewise, I’m confused about the Extender support issue, since the Extender should work with the XL2 just like it does with any other MCE on the market (maybe they’re hit a firewall or anti-virus issue?).

And streaming DVDs… We’d love to do it but the number of our customers who own DVD changers is a very small and a decreasing percentage of our install base. Plus, it’s only a matter of time before HD DVD and managed copy surpasses traditional DVDs.

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CE Pro seems to have some sort of scoop on what could be our HD DVD plans, Vista May Not Support HD DVD at Launch:

A Microsoft spokesperson says, “Vista’s architecture will recognize both HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD; however, current plans for Media Center support of either of these formats is unknown at this time. We do know that there will be a great HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD experience for Media Center either at Vista launch or soon after as either an extensible application or natively in MCE.”

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Euan is working on a DVD cover grabber for those of you using My DVDs. Great to see!

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Niveus press release, Niveus Media Announces Patent-Pending Network Virtualization Technology for the Niveus Disc Changer:

Niveus Media, Inc., manufacturer of media entertainment devices for the high-end audio/video market, has announced the development of network virtualization technology for the Niveus Disc Changer – Ice Vault 200. The latest of Niveus proprietary add-ons to the Windows XP Media Center Platform, Niveus virtualization technology allows single, or multiple, Niveus Disc Changers to serve up an entire collection of DVD Movies to any zone on the home network powered by a Niveus Media Center.

Great to see a company like Niveus not just doing hardware innovation but also software innovation on top of our platform. This additional functionality should also justify their high price tag for the Ice Vault as compared to the Sony XL1. Of course, the first question that comes to mind and everyone with an XBox 360 is, will it stream to the XBox 360 or just other Media Centers? I suspect not since Niveus’s motivation here is to sell more Niveus machines and not XBox’s and very likely this requires both client and server software to work.

I’m excited to see this first hand on Thursday down at CES.

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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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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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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, Hack for enabling Movies TV Portal outside of the USA.

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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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