Windows Media Center Movie Project

Posted on by Jordan

This is going to be kind of technical, but I have to document the process somewhere….

I have a Windows Media Center PC, hooked to our TV. We don’t have cable, so its not acting as a DVR. I have been planning to setup a plugin called “My Movies” that does a nice graphical browser of all movies stored on a Windows Home Server box, which I happen to have.

I actually had most of this setup months ago, but had run into some problems coping movies to the server. My motivation for all of this is the fact that Heather owns *hundreds* of DVDs. To save space we threw out the cases, and put all the disks into a book. The problem is, its hard to even remember what the movie is about sometimes if they have a generic printing on the disk. The My Movies plugin gives you a picture of the box, and a synopsis, as well as actor list, etc. All really cool, but it was being stubborn about working.

First let me outline the problem:

  • My Movies is a free* tool that will do everything I mentioned before, and auto-add any movie placed in a folder it is watching.
  • It also provides hooks to copy movies using AnyDVD.
  • AnyDVD is kind of expensive for a hobby project of questionable long-term value.
  • there are a number of other cheaper tools that do the same thing as AnyDVD, ranging all the way down to free
  • none of these tools seem to work with My Movies, in the sense that you can just hit the “copy” button
  • I am starting to suspect the My Movies people did this on purpose, as there is no discernible reason the other tools wouldn’t work the same way.
  • Trying to find a work-around was painful, as nobody wants to host the entire tool-set to go from factory DVD to playable files on your hard drive, lest the incur the wrath of the MPAA

After something like 12-18 hours of fussing with it, I finally found a system that’s working. I did have one DVD fail to read so far. I have some ideas for that, but I will come back to it after I have worked through the majority of our library.

The system that works:

  • have dvd43 running, this will allow other applications to read the disk
  • use dvd Shrink  “backup” option to re sample the disk, set the target folder as the movies folder on the server

I think that I may be able to use “superDVDRipper” to get a usable video out of the one disk DVDshrink failed to read, but its slow and kind of finicky… so I will deal with that later.

-Jordan