My Movies for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition

[Jeremy Charette]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mymovies.name/home.aspx' target='_blank'>http://www.mymovies.name/home.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"My Movies is available in about 10 different languages, and movie data can be downloaded in English, German, French or Japanese. With My Movies you can experience your movie collection in a way you never thought possible, filtering your collection by genres, actors, directors, MPAA parental level and much more. My Movies can even help you copy your DVD's to hard drive storage for easy playback!"</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/8ff32a3d-4ecb-41a1-ad8c-1fd61af917e9-award.gif" /> <br /><br />Well, it figures. Since Microsoft won't allow you to legally rip DVDs to your hard drive and index them (like they let you do with music CDs), someone else went ahead and created a program to do just that. You'll need some pretty hefty storage to make this work for you, but if you've got it, use it. I have to imagine that if I had a program like this, I'd watch the movies I own alot more often. Call me lazy, but once DVDs go on the shelf, I just forget about them. Who wants to get up, put in the disc, start up the DVD player...when you can use a remote to watch whatever's on cable (or movies on demand)? Great application, and on top of that, it's free. Whether or not it's "legal"...I'll let you decide that for yourself.

[Jason Dunn]

I was initially very excited about this, until I read that using the Xbox 360 as an extender doesn't really work:

http://www.mymovies.name/documentation/xbox360extender.aspx

And this is a tangent, but "1st Price Winner"? Either that's something I don't grasp, or they have a typo on their award graphic, which is rather amusing. :lol:

[freiberghk]

I've been using this program for almost two years now. It is an excellent way of sorting through a large video collection, and the author has been terrific about taking suggestions and constantly updating the software. :werenotworthy:

I use this as a front end on my MCE pc's to access movies that are stored on a home server. It works terrific!!!

When I lived in Hong Kong, there was only a couple of English stations on TV. I built up a huge DVD collection for family entertainment. When I got my first MCE PC, I had to order it from the USA and have it shipped to HK. I spent 6 months trying to get a PAL tuner to work in the box, and eventually gave up as the benefit of getting two English stations was nowhere near worth the hassle involved in getting the correct drivers loaded. (and there was no EPG support) Ironically, I could get the BBC station as it was broadcast in NTSC. (Go figure???)

I set about ripping my DVD collection to Divx and used the MCE PC entirely to play music, display pictures, and stream videos... I used to use a Kiss DVD player which could also stream music, pictures, and Divx movies from a server. But after installing and using My Movies for the first time, I could never go back to the text interface on the Kiss player.

This program is a great example of the flexibility you get with using HTPCs instead of cable box dvr's, Kiss dvd players, etc... Although I'd have to agree that HTPCs are not for everyone... They're usually more expensive, and definitely require much more tinkering. (It is Windows after all) :wink: