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Software Review: My Movies 3.0 for Windows Media Center

By on October 31, 2009 in News, Reviews, Software, Video, Windows Media Center

My Movies is one of the first software titles that comes to mind when discussing movie database software.  Some of Brian Binnerup’s My Movies creations are

Today, we are discussing the first one on the list, My Movies for Windows Media Center.  Which brings me to the first question, “What is My Movies for Windows Media Server?”

My Movies for Windows Media Center is a movie collection program for Windows Media Center in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Windows Media Center is a built-in feature in the Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate packages, as well as the Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate packages.

With My Movies for Windows Media Center, you can experience your entire movie collection, and browse through and play your movies, browse cast, play trailers and much more by using a remote control within your living room or home theatre. My Movies for Windows Media Center also includes the My Movies Collection Management product, which allows you to maintain and manage your movie collection outside Windows Media Center.

The second question that comes to mind is “I am a WHS user.  Which version of My Movies do I need?”  Ah, that is the question that I will take a look at shortly.  Patience!

Before I get into the review, I (almost) always like to provide a little “About” blurb on the company behind the product, so:

Introduction

My Movies is a product brand of Binnerup Consult, a company based in Århus, Denmark. Our company delivers software and meta-data to many large and small companies focused on products around Media Centers and Home Servers.

My Movies was originally started as a spare time project as “My DVD Collection” for Media Center 2004 in August 2004, after a person named Bill unfortunately was forced to shut down his unfinished project named “DVD Jukebox”, at a time where it still had several loose ends. “My DVD Collection” quickly filled the gap for the users who had previously been using “DVD Jukebox”, you can still see a news post from eHomeUpgrade from back then, here.

The Caveat

And another “before I get into the review” comment.

Due to legality in several countries, My Movies do not backup copy protected DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray titles. Users in countries that allow circumventing CSS and AACS copy protections when backing up their movies can install SlySoft AnyDVD or AnyDVD HD to remove these copy protections.

To tell you the honest truth, I do not know what the current law in the US.  I will tell you I use DVDFab 6 to rip DVD’s I have purchased to my WHS for playback from a central source vs. having to pop in a DVD one at a time.  My ripped collection is simply that, a collection of my DVD’s in a central location for easy perusal.  I do not give away or sell or distribute in any way any of these files, so I hope that this will not send the MPAA police after me.

Perhaps the way I look at it is if I have purchased an item, what I do with it in the privacy of my home is my business.

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About Jim Clark

Hello. I’m from the heartland of the U.S. Lots of corn and beans, although Iowa is a lot more than just farmland. It also has a few computer enthusiasts (no, not me!). I’ve been around PCs since I got my 1st PC XT aloooong time ago. WGS is one of the first sites I found centered around WHS. And the best. Every once in awhile, I do get away from the KB and enjoy time with and my wife and our 4 kids. And I do have a day job.
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  • http://www.geekzone.co.nz M Freitas

    MyMovies WHS is lacking, at minimum. Tried it and although Ihave a few hundred movies in my WHS shares, the software only "sees" 28 of those and didn't load any of the XML files required for my Media Center to load the information.

    I would say let it go for now. Maybe it will work ok later, but MyMovies WHS 3.0 is not there yet.

    This is an issue reported in their forums, but so far there's not official replies. It strikes me that a small company that should be interested in creating great software is not capable of monitoring – and answering – their own support forums.

  • autodrivel

    @Jim
    Why MyMovies for WHS? – well for one thing it puts the database on a central store – MM for WHS includes an automatic backup of that database.
    Also being on WHS it then shares out the goodness to any attached Media Centers – I have one on the main TV and both kids have MC Vista. MM for WHS serves all three.

    @M Freitas
    I must redress the balance here – I gave MyMovies my 900+ DVD collection to feed on and it got all but 30 spot on, of those, I think 20 were the American version (I'm in the UK) and the other 10 were "random" – not a bad error level. The biggest thing that MyMovies needs is for the DVDs to be in IFO file format – i.e. the entire content of the DVD ripped verbatim and stored as one DVD per folder. Any other layout, ISO images, single files, etc it doesn't do so well – maybe that was your problem.
    On the support front – I have always found the forum responsive in sortting any issues and frequently, I've had near-real-time exchanges with Brian Binnerup in fixing problems. The forum has a heavily European influence (since it's Danish), maybe you are being penalised by the timezone difference between DK and NZ?

    Anyhow, for me MyMovies is the DVD manager of choice!

  • http://dbone1026.blogspot.com DamianP

    @ M Freitas,

    For your movies that were not picked up did you use another program (like Metabrowser) to generate the mymovies.xml file? MyMovies 3.0 will ignore any movie that had the xml created by another program ( I ran into this problem as over half my collection did not get picked up by MM). With MyMovies 3.1 (or 3.01, whatever it is called) MyMovies will actually warn the user about the non MM3 xml files and delete/write over

    @ Jim – I agree, it is somewhat difficult to fix movie errors. I have CM set for folder monitoring, so when I pop a dvd into my ROM drive it appears to add it to CM. However, I use Clown_BD to pull out all the crap for the movie and save a single .ts file, so I need to go back into CM later on and reassign the movie to the correct file location. I will have to take a closer look at this.

    • http://www.geekzone.co.nz M Freitas

      Damian, never used other programs – I tried mymovies before with Windows Vista MCE but with Windows 7 MCE I decided to only use the WHS part of it to create the metadata…

  • http://www.mymovies.dk Brian Binnerup

    There are various reasons that a movie can be identified wrong – typically it has to do with folder naming, but it can be identified only specifically by determining in the log.

    If a title is identified incorrect, you right click the title in the title list and choose "Change Data Source and Title", and locate the title.

    In My Movies 2 we had this function also in the Media Center interface, but removed it for My Movies 3 – this was based on some users way of using things incorrect, and it will be re-added.

  • http://www.mymovies.dk Brian Binnerup

    If movies are not identified, it is either because they are not registered as perceivedType=video (video files) in Windows, or because invalid mymovies.xml files that were not stored by My Movies is in the folders. My Movies 3 warns about this and handles it, but My Movies for WHS does not yet.

    The purpose of My Movies for WHS is to have the WHS function as a server back-end for multiple clients, as well as giving fully automatic DVD and CD copying directly on the server, without the need for any user interaction – in my house it means that both my kids and wife know that they just insert a disc onto the WHS drive, and when it pops out, it's available on their Media Centers.

    If there are other questions, feel free to ask!

    • Christian Langgaard

      I've been using mymovies for a couple of years now, and honestly happily supported the project by donating, thereby unlocking features like fanart download. All I'm waiting for now is for Brian to extend the WHS version to generate the HTML code necesary to act as a webservice frontend for my Popcorn Hour mediaplayers. Functionality wise the programs has always worked very well for me, especially when we still used a Mediacenter frontend for our TV. Mainly because i could rip the kids dvd's and avoid scratches, fingers etc. on top of the very wife and kid friendly interface. When we moved to a HD setup, the PC could no longer pull the load and we had to go Popcorn mediaplayer. So – Brian – keep up the great work – but please make my christmas and get round to the popcorn hour frontend ;)

  • Duncan

    In my opinion, this review makes some unfairly negative comments. If you look at the few dedicated users and developer that commented on this, you'll see the folly in these comments. My Movies is a highly polished, powerful tool that requires some research to set-up. Additionally, it has an extremely active forum with both incredibly helpful members and developers. Throw in the fact that it's free and it's probably the best Movie Library applications available.

  • Scott C

    My question is whether My Movies will handle a non-DVD based collection? I've got about 500 movies, mostly in mpeg and avi formats, so not stored as an ISO or other DVD format.

    The WMC interface for movies is dreadful, so I'm looking for something that'll extend that functionality.

    • http://dbone1026.blogspot.com DamianP

      My Movies handles not-DVDs (i.e. ISO, mkv, ts, etc…) without issue.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

    @M Freitas MyMovies has been pretty flawless for me. Actually there is one flaw, my xbox throws some sort of error when I try to connect to MyMovies.

    • revenger

      If you use MyMovies for WHS then you have to enable the Guest account in WHS.

      • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

        Yup guest has been enabled since I bought WHS, read permission is on the video folder.

  • Steve

    Would an EX470 with the 2GB ram upgrade be stout enough to rip blurays directly? I am guessing the software has no options to encode to another format?

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Clark Jim_Clark

      You would need a ripper such as AnyDVD or DVDFab to rip to any format. My Movies does not do the actual ripping.

      Regarding a EX470, it would probably encode OK, but you may not want to be doing much else during the rip/encode.

  • Steve

    @Brian Binnerup

    "The purpose of My Movies for WHS is to have the WHS function as a server back-end for multiple clients, as well as giving fully automatic DVD and CD copying directly on the server, without the need for any user interaction – in my house it means that both my kids and wife know that they just insert a disc onto the WHS drive, and when it pops out, it's available on their Media Centers."

  • Mike

    First of all it looks like you are just using the WHS to be your network story for the movies and then using My Movies to display and play them. I have had a HTPC (Home Theater PC) for 6-7 years and just had them on a network share. Then I moved to a Popcorn Hour unit and I have most of my collection in HD now. I also have a WHS and moved a 1TB drive to my WHS and would stream the collection from their. The problem I ran into was that the WHS kept running a disk balancing (can not remember the program but very will documented) right in the middle of watching a movie and then it would take up to 80-90% of the CPU and have a problem streaming the data. It may work fine for regular DVDs but I finally just pulled the 1TB drive out and moved it to a dedicated machine.

    Do not get me wrong I love WHS and have had it since it came out, and for network shares, backups and remote access to files and machines it works great. But a a big drive in the sky for streaming HD content it does not fly.

    • http://dbone1026.blogspot.com DamianP

      I stream HD content regularly to my 2 HTPCs in my house from my WHS and don't have any issues, and I know quite a few people who do the same exact thing. The issue you had may have been the result of an underpowered WHS. as I know folks who were running with the first gen single core EX470 encountered the same issue.

      • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

        First gen EX470, I stream HD and SD movies on a regular basis (sometimes simultaneously). I've never had a problem like that; maybe he's running the Lx series.
        I've got 4 drives and duplication on almost all folders too.

  • Mike

    Also:
    If you go to HD content check out the YAMJ (similar user interface to My Movies) interface for the Popcorn Hour. As I said most of my content is now HD via a 1080P projector on a 10ft. screen is the YAMJ interface is great. Also, I used to use XLobby which was a free product on my HTPC that was similar to My Movies, but did not require the MC PC. I do not know if it is still around.

  • talex

    have not tried mm 3 yet but have been using I think 2.7 or so. Always works fine for cateloging. I have 600+ movies in .avi format stored on my whs in videosmoviesmovienamemoviename.avi. I tell my movies to look at the videosmovies folder and it identifies almost all of them on it's own. Will be giving 3.0 a try soon, just installed win 7 on main pc in living room. I also have used media browser which also is excellent and has a nicer interface so far as I can tell but I think media browser requires meta data from something like mm to work.

  • Kabuki

    Is there a folder view in MyMovies? I do like to store all movies for my Kids in a separate folder, so that they cannot see the other movies.

  • Hagrid

    my movies is very bad, large size

  • James Walker

    Jim- I just loaded Mymovies 4 and trying to use it with windows 7 pro Mediacenter – however when I go to play movies through Windows 7 MCE the video is nothing but green squares, did you have to load any codecs?

    • DamianP

      Codecs are required if you are trying to play back content that isn't supported by the internal WMC player (i.e mkv, vc-1 m2ts, etc…)