Collect Your Movies
After DVD Shrink is finished, the next step is to use the “Collection Management” utility to add your movies and, optionally, go online to find more information about them.
To add your movie, click “Add Titles.” Then type in the name of your title.
Then click “Search” to make My Movies consult the web service. In the image below, it’s found the movie by title.
Since the movie is now present on the PC’s external drive, select “Add online” and point to the movie’s folder.
Finally, select the folder to save the movie to. The default is “Owned, For Keeps.” In the image below, My Movies went online and retrieved the information about the movie automatically. On lesser known movies, it’s necessary to query IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) manually in order to retrieve the information.
Some Fine Tuning
There are some options to look at while we’re still using the Collection Manager. Click on Configure, then Media Center Interface. If you’re going to be using a laptop or showing the movies on your PC monitor, I suggest that you select, “Interface is optimized for usage with mouse or touch screen.”
Under Views, select Thumbnails or List format. Here’s what each looks like in Media Center.
Images
You might also want to un-select “Include disks in local DVD drives in the title list,” particularly if you frequently rent DVDs and don’t want these movies included in the list.
Finishing Up
And there we have it. My Movies allows us to turn Media Center into a DVD jukebox. It works fine at desktop level and at the ten-foot level with the remote. Unfortunately, there’s not a way (that I’ve found so far) to go straight to My Movies from the remote.
There are two ways to add DVDs to My Movies. If you also purchase AnyDvd, you can copy an inserted disk directly to your storage location using My Movies. This is the fastest method, but it also provides the largest file sizes.
If you want the fine control over your rip, final file size, and content, the steps above with DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink will get you there.
And there’s one last thing. If you have previously stored DVDs on your hard drive as ISO image files, Virtual Clone Drive, also by SlySoft, will allow you to mount the ISO files as if they were DVD drives. You may then open the files in DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink as if they were physical DVDs, or you may then use My Movies to copy the files into the format it recognizes for you.
Thank you for reading this.
We hope you are enjoying reading and learning at the new Bright Hub.
