My Movies v3 Released

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mymovies.dk/home/news-history.aspx' target='_blank'>http://www.mymovies.dk/home/news-history.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"My Movies 3 is now available with a fully redesigned Media Center interface, for Windows Vista Media Center and Windows 7 Media Center. My Movies 3 is build with focus on reliability, stability and speed. My Movies 3 will easily handle collections up to 5,000 titles, or even larger. The default functionalities in My Movies 3 is free as they were in My Movies 2, and as in My Movies 2, some advanced features requires a certain amount of points to be unlocked."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1256338983.usr1.jpg" style="border: 0;" /></p><p>My Movies is an incredibly power, though somewhat complex program that allows you to have a very rich experience browsing through your movies. This is the holy grail for me, and I'm trying to figure out what the best way to do this is. I don't really want to connect a PC to my TV, but it seems like that might be the only option because the Xbox 360 is so weak when it comes to being a great digital media player.</p>

[Felix Torres]

I've had "good-enough" results with the 360 by simply dumping the media content onto a terabyte external drive. The only real issues are the limited formats supported. Local support for MPEG2 or VOB would solve most of my problems but that's not coming anytime soon.

I'm currently attacking the problem from another, but similar, angle hooking up the external drive to the Oppo BD drive. The video quality (given the built-in scaler) is outstanding. Lack of support for MS formats is the only disappointment. But since it does support VOB files and multiple external drives, I think I can use the Oppo to hold my archived DVD shows and use a double-connect NAS box (usb to the 360 and ethernet to the remote media center PC) to hold the TV shows I DVR but its going to be a while before I can test the rest. First I need get a Hauppage HD-PVR box and get it working with Win7 media center, though.

Going to be a while before I can get to it as I'm kinda busy these days...

[Eriq Cook]

I've been using My Movies for almost 2 years now, and it's a great tool. Although I no longer use My Movies in Windows Media Center because Win7 has it's own movie library now, I still use it to grab movie data. I have to admit though, the new interface looks slick so I'll probably download version 3 and use it in Win7 Media Center.

Having a PC connected to the TV isn't bad at all. In fact, it works great. Until earlier this year I had a notebook hidden in the back of our entertainment center running Vista Home Premium and Media Center. Then I wanted to watch TV in Media Center so I replaced the notebook with a desktop I had lying around (Pentium D) so I could install a TV card.

Coupled with my logitech dinovo mini keyboard, I like having the ability to use Media Center to play music or watch TV, then switch to Internet Explorer and surf the web (mainly watching youtube, hulu or Tekzilla LOL). My Wife isn't a fan of the case, but I plan on building a PC using a smaller case or one that looks more like a home theater component.

I'm disappointed that the 360 still doesn't have built-in support for streaming TV or movies from another media center PC (without 3rd party software that's a pain to setup). If it did, I'd rather use a 360 too (and live without the browser lol).

[Andy Dixon]

I've been using My Movies for a year or so now to download all my movie data for the DVD's stored on my home server. It's very good at what it does and fairly simple to use. However, the Media Centre plugin for it never really impressed me enough that I used it. As Media Centre has it's own DVD library I simply used that.

If this new version is much improved and works considerably better than the old version then it might be enough to make me start using it. The biggest problem I have is the initial loading of the movie list which can take a while to generate and display before I can load a movie. Hopefully this new version will fix that so the list loads a lot quicker. That alone will make it worth using.