Hacking a Media Center DVD Library

I've been using this for a while, it's very convenient. The worst thing, though, is the metadata. If you pop a DVD into your Media Center PC, an XML file containing metadata will be written to a DVDInfoCache folder. Trouble is, it'll almost always be incomplete, and Media center won't know what XML file to use for the ripped DVD's.

To make Media Center understand, you need to place another XML file called a DVD ID file into the folder to which you ripped your DVD. That DVD ID file contains an ID that points to the proper XML metadata file in DVDInfoCache.

I wrote an application a while ago that you can use to edit the metadata for all XML files in the DVDInfocache folder in a convenient way, add cover art to your ripped DVD folder, and automatically write the proper DVD ID file to your ripped DVD folder so that Media Center knows where to find the right metadata in DvdInfoCache.

I've never really finished or documented it, but it works, in a way. If you're interested, you can find the VS2008 project (C#) here.

Feel free to edit to your wish. You'll need to give the proper DvdInfoCache path in app.config, and a bunch of stuff probably isn't translated, but hopefully you'll be able to run with it. Remember that you need to place the original DVD in the media center PC first in order to let it generate the DVDInfoCache XML file.

the problem is that none of this works from a media centre extender (e.g. xbox 360).  For the vast majority of end users - the Media PC needs to live somewhere other than the family room (e.g office). 

When will Microsoft stop pushing Desktop PC's & Servers into our living rooms and push extenders more?

I have a dumped all of my DVD disks (movies and home videos) onto HDD storage (4.5Tb) and have consigned the disks to a box in the loft (yeah no more shelf space needed).  However, I have to use modified Xbox 1's running XBMC (three of them) to get this media into the rooms I need it.  If this could be done on MCX extenders I would be much happier as they support HD as well.

 

side note:  although the media format support has improved on the Xbox 360 over time - support for DVD folders has always been forgotten.

Hi hchohan:

I agree with you that not everyone can put a PC in the living room directly hooked up to the TV.  This post was meant for people that are interested in this functionality if they DO have the setup.

To your point, however, for those people that want to stream content... a new option is to rip your movies to DivX format and stream them to the X-Box 360 which since the Fall Update a few days ago includes DivX and XviD codecs.

I've been thinking about things like this recently. I have a lot of TV stored as DivX to save space. I'm currently using the Video Library built into Media Center to watch them. It's ok but it's really missing support for marking things as watched, ratings and a whole host of other features I'd like. I'm seriously thinking about writing a 'plugin' using the SDK but I only have Vista Business on my laptop and $180 to upgrade to Ultimate seems a bit steep to me. It'd be great if MS released a 'development' version of Media Centre in the SDK to allow people to develop Media Center apps on Vista Business

My movies does this a whole lot better I beleive. www.mymovies.name