Turn Your Vista or Windows XP Media Center PC into a Video Jukebox

“My Movies” is a donation-ware add-in for Media Center in Vista Premium and Ultimate and Windows XP Media Center 2005. It allows you to organize and store your purchased DVDs on your hard drive, along with the album artwork and cast notes.

Here’s what My Movies looks like running in Vista Media Center.

My Movies is capable of copying an inserted DVD to the hard drive by itself. However, if the DVD is copy-protected, as virtually all commercial DVDs have been for the last couple of years, playback in Media Center will fail, and My Movies will not expressly warn you of this.

There are two very different techniques you can use with My Movies. One involves running AnyDVD by SlySoft on the PC. It acts as a “midde-man” between the DVD drive and Windows, allowing Windows to open the files on a protected DVD.

The other technique is manual, but it offers finer control, so that’s the method we’ll discuss here.

This involves using DVD Decrypter to copy the files from the DVD to the hard drive and then using DVD Shrink to remove unwanted portions of the video and unneeded languages. Both DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink are freeware, but you’ll need to find them on the Internet for yourself. I can’t link to them here.

Anyway, we’ll look as well at using Virtual CloneDrive, to which I can link, to open a movie file that’s previously been saved as an ISO image to use with My Movies.

Here’s a run through of the steps involved.

First, download the My Movies 2 add-in for Media Center and install it.

You’ll need to get the “server” version for the PC on which the movies will be stored. My Movies is distributed as a 78,646 KB zip file. It extracts to this.

Double-clicking setup.exe runs the installer. It first installs Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and then the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime. Then it installs itself.

Below are the items added to the Vista “All Programs” menu and what the application looks like at first run.

That’s all we need to do with My Movies right now - just install it. We’ll come back to it when we’re ready to add a movie.

If you place a DVD in your drive before starting DVD Decrypter and only one DVD is inserted, DVD Decrypter will very quickly select it and load the files from the DVD. If you have more than one DVD player loaded, you can select the one you want under the “File” menu.

Here’s what DVD Decrypter looks like when it’s running.

I have DVD Decrypter set to output to C:\Movies on my Vista machine. To specify the folder to which DVD Decrypter should write the files, click the folder icon to the right of “Destination:”

Then click the green arrow icon to run the program. For a 7.5 GB movie, DVD Decrypter runs for about twenty minutes.

After DVD Decrypter has copied the files from the DVD to the hard drive, the next step is to start DVD Shrink. Start by clicking “Open Files” and then navigate to the folder (C:\Movies?) where you stored the files from the DVD.

The image below shows DVD Shrink with movie files open and “No compression” selected. As you can see, this movie started out as 6,677 MB. DVD Shrink allows us to un-select parts that we don’t need. For example, if you don’t want the Spanish and French language tracks included, you can un-check them. You can also delete the Extras folder if you wish.

Click “No compression” to see the other sizes that DVD Shrink suggests. In general, three to four GB end size makes for a quality compressed movie.

After you make your selections and click “Back Up,” DVD Shrink displays this dialog.

In the image above, the movie is being redirected to the external F: drive. It’s important that “Create VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subfolders” is selected, because My Movies looks for that.

Here’s what DVD Shrink looks like when it’s running.

The final product will be a set of movie files from the DVD, customized the way you want them and optionally compressed to take up less space.

Next: Collecting Your Movie Data, Fine Tuning, and Finishing Up