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Permalink to this day Friday, October 21, 2005

Green Button, Hack for enabling Movies TV Portal outside of the USA.
10:48:12 AM  Permalink to this item []

How to get locally copied DVDs to show up in My DVDs

Disclaimer: Everything posted below is unsupported. We built and tested My DVDs to work for DVD changers, not local content. That it does, is a nice bonus :).

Assuming you have several locally copied DVDs on your hard drive you can get them to show up in My DVDs and play in Media Center. Here's the basic method of getting this to work:

  1. Enable My DVDs. Load up regedit.exe and find this key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings]. Double click on it and change "ShowGallery"="Play" to "ShowGallery"="Gallery". Alternatively, here's a little file to do this for you courtsey of Sean, ShowMCEGallery.zip.
  2. Copy your DVD to your hard drive. I recommend that when you copy DVDs locally that you select the option to have them chunked at 1 gig and the output should by something of the form c:\my dvds\mattsdvd. Underneath c:\my dvds\mattsdvd you'll find c:\my dvds\mattsdvd\video_ts and in video_ts you'll find a video.ifo file in addition to several other files.
  3. Get cover art. There are a number of places to find cover art. Once you've find the correct cover art drop the cover art in c:\my dvds\mattsdvd\folder.jpg
  4. Add folder to My Videos. The My DVDs gallery searches the same path as My Videos so if your DVD is not showing up go to My Videos, press CTRL-D, and go through the Videos Media Discovery wizard and add c:\my dvds.

But wait, what about rich metadata?

If you want rich metadata you need to:

  1. Create a mattsdvd.dvdid.xml file. In c:\my dvds\mattsdvd create a file called mattsdvd.dvdid.xml. It's of the form:
    <Disc> <Name>Matt's DVD</Name> <ID>00000000|00000000/<ID> </Disc>
    Where the 0..0|0..0 is the CRC64 id of the DVD. I'll dig up more on the CRC64 hash function shortly. But in the meantime, it's an ID calculated based off the original DVD. If you drop it in the dvdid file we'll query our metadata provider and pull down the rest of the metadata for you and store it in our DvdInfoCache. If you don't have it, continue to step 2 where you can create your own rich metadata file in DvdInfoCache.
  2. If you don't have the CRC64, make one up, put it in your dvdid file
  3. Create a [CRC64].xml file. In c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\DvdInfoCache create an xml file named 00000000-00000000.xml (or whatever your made up CRC64 is. Instead of posting a sample because it's rather long, you can download one here for Stephen King's IT: 7e96a250-1c80bfc9.xml.
As you can see, this is not super straightforward, because to re-iterate, My DVDs is for folks with DVD changers. However, I totally expect a savy community member to take the above info and build a plugin which will automate the process of creating these XML files.
10:25:36 AM  Permalink to this item []

© Copyright 2005 Matt Goyer.
I work at Microsoft in the eHome division on the Windows XP Media Center Edition team as a Program Manager.

Disclaimer: The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

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Updated: 11/1/2005; 1:44:11 PM.