If you read my blog, or talk to me about Media Center at all you have certainly heard of My Movies; in-fact according to CNET its been downloaded 354,000; that's more than any other Media Center add-on hosted by CNET by far.
That being said one of the most common complaints about My Movies is that it has not yet abandoned its Media Center 2005 roots and migrated to the Vista only user interface language called MCML it instead uses HTML as the means to generate its user interface as this is the technology that is supported by both Vista and Media Center 2005.
Brian (the author of My Movies) is working on a new version that does use this VISTA only mark-up language and I hope to see it in the near future but did you know you can use My Movies for its collection management capabilities without using its presentation layer?
My Movies has one of the most complete web services of meta-data (at least for US titles) available, that web service combined with the clients folder monitoring capability makes for a powerful combination.
So if you don't use the My Movies presentation capabilities what would you use? Well there are a few choices out there but I am going to talk about two in this post, the first of which is the Media Center native DVD gallery and the second being the newly released beta of the Niveus Movie Library.
I won't get into the relative merits of each of these options, at least not in this post, but instead focus on how you can use them with My Movies.
Both of these components have something in-common, they rely on dvdid.xml files to cache meta-data; the thing most people don't know is that My Movies generates these files for every DVD (VIDEO_TS folder with a VIDEO_TS.IFO file) so that the built in DVD Gallery (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930526) can show the same meta data as My Movies (this meta data is substantially better than what Microsoft makes available through its relationship with AMG).
This capability in My Movies is great because even if you were satisfied with the basic meta-data offered by Microsoft for the DVD Gallery Microsoft provides no way to edit the data if its incorrect or incomplete nor do they provide a automatic way to get meta-data of movies stored on your hard disk; the thing is My Movies does.
So how do you use My Movies and not use its presentation layer? Simple just install the My Movies Server package and the 1st time you run Media Center you will be asked if you want to integrate My Movies into the Media Center Start Menu, just say no.
But what if you already integrated My Movies with the Media Center Start Menu and you have changed your mind? Just open Collection Manager and go to Configure/Media Center Interface/Interface and select the "Reset" option next to the "Current Menu Program Access" setting; once you do this open up Media Center and when prompted if you want to have My Movies integrated with the Media Center Start Menu say no.
Its that simple, now if you have My Movies monitoring the same folder locations as the DVD Gallery you will have all that great My Movies meta-data.
But what about the new Niveus Movie Library? It also utilizes those dvdid.xml files for meta data, so again all you need to do is install My Movies and not register its presentation layer with the start menu.