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

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I can’t have Sean scoop me on my own feature… If you don’t have a changer you can enable the ‘My DVDs’ functionality with the following reg key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings]
“ShowGallery”=”Gallery”

But there’s a lot more to it then just turning on this reg key… I’ll post more once I get a breather here in NYC.

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