One of the coolest features in My Movies is its ability to monitor folders for new titles and automatically download the meta-data for those titles; it has three modes of operation, these include:
Loose - My Movies will do its best to find the meta-data for the title and will use what it thinks is the best match of the results it finds.
Strict - My Movies will do its best to find the meta-data for the title but unlike loose will only use matches where there is a exact title match.
Confirmative - My Movies will do its best to find the meta-data for the title and will present you with what it thinks is the best match to confirm if you want to use that data or not.
I personally use the Confirmative mode (the default), this lessens the chance of me getting bad data into my collection, it does not eliminate it as a possibility as the search is done based on what My Movies thinks the title of the movie is only and titles are not unique (for example there is an Italian Job from 1969 and another from 2003).
You need to know a few more things to use folder monitoring successfully, for example how My Movies determines what it thinks the title for the movie is, since My Movies monitors folder creation it doesn't really have much to go on but it makes the best of the information it has, namely the name of the folder containing the playable media, for example if your monitoring \\servername\movies and you create a folder called "The Italian Job (1969)" it will search the My Movies web service for "The Italian Job" (e.g. dropping the (, [ and anything after them).
Another thing you should know before you start using file monitoring is when the feature is working, specifically folder monitoring happens in a background add-in within Media Center so if Media Center is not running folder monitoring isn't going to happen.
From an experience standpoint what this means is that when I add a title to the "movies" share (when in Confirmative mode), for example the "Italian Job (1969)", My Movies will search the web service for "Italian Job" which will result in me being prompted if the match it found for the title was right and if I want to use the data it found.
Finally the last thing you should know is what happens when you add content when Media Center is not running, the answer to this question is easy; when Media Center starts up it starts up the My Movies background add-in which then looks for changes since the last time it ran, if it finds any, it adds them just like it would have if the title was found while Media Center is running.
Now you should be asking yourselves, that was all find and good but wasn't he going to tell us how to get this mess working on extenders? The answer to that? why yes I am :)
In my home we don't actually watch content on the Media Center PC, we use Media Center Extenders as such folder monitoring doesn't work for me without a little dance, specifically enabling it for the Media Center Extender users.
The things is My Movies supports per-user settings, these settings are tweak-able inside the My Movies Collection Manager program but they edit the interactive users settings not the extender settings that doesn't mean it doesn't work though.
So how do you enable folder monitoring for extenders (thanks to rollinghippy at mymovies.name for the bellow step-by-step)?
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Configure folder monitoring for the interactive user within Collection Manager (and any other settings you would like to have cloned to the extender user)
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Open the registry editor and export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MY MOVIES
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Select the HKEY_USERS key and click "FILE - LOAD HIVE"
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Open NTUSER.DAT in SYSTEMROOT:\USERS\MCX1
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When asked for the Key Name enter "MCX1"
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Edit the registry file you exported and do a Replace All for "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" with "HKEY_USERS\MCX1"
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Import the edited registry file
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Select the MCX1 key you loaded and click "FILE - UNLOAD HIVE" (You must unload the hive for the settings to be saved back in to NTUSER.DAT)
If you just followed these steps you have just set up the MCX1 user to have the exact same settings as the interactive user you configured with Collection Manager, now wash-rinse-repeat for each MCX user.
Ah, I just remembered two other things you should keep in mind with My Movies folder monitoring, it has two "control files" that you can put into the movie folder, one is called a ignore file (mymovies.ign) and the other is called a do-not-add (mymovies.dna) file.
If either of these control files exist in the movie folder folder monitoring will skip that folder, the .ign file is ephemeral in nature it will be deleted if its older than 6 hours, it exists to stop multiple instances (multiple users like in this extender case) from operating on the same movie at the same time, the .dna file is permanent (until you delete it) and it prevents My Movies from ever adding the file.
In summary with just a little bit of work extender users can also benefit from My Movies folder monitoring capability