Jeff’s Place

I’ve been fiddling lately with Windows Vista, attempting to get the Media Center software to recognize and play DVD’s stored on a hard drive (rather than a dvd in the dvd drive). It’s a bit frustrating but eventually following a few simple tricks it does seem to work. The DVD player functionality seems to be not a good as, for example, WinDVD, but this effort is part of a larger goal to re-build my home media systems to run from a computer-based system rather than individual audio/video components, and since the concept behind Windows Media Center seems to be going the right direction, I decided to give it a try.

First, you have to ding the windows registry to make Windows Media Center offer a DVD Gallery instead of just offering to play from the DVD drive. Open regedit and edit:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings\ShowGallery

Change the value from “Play” to “Gallery”

Then you have to prepare your content, there are really just a few steps:

1: Get your DVD’s onto the hard drive. There are lots of ways to do this, pick one, you’ll end up with a bunch of .VOB and .IFO files probably in a VIDEO_TS folder. You have to re-organize the folder hierarchy to make windows recognize it. Say you end up with a file hierarchy:

E:\DVDs\Terminator\VIDEO_TS

where you’ve put the “Terminator” DVD files, they’re all in the VIDEO_TS folder. Move all the files up one level so they’re in the “Terminator” folder, and delete the VIDEO_TS folder (it should be empty now). Unfortunately this will break other programs ability to play the DVD, specifically WinDVD requires the VIDEO_TS folder name to contain the dvd content. Oh well, pick one and stick with it I guess.

2: Find a jpeg image you want to use for the DVD cover photo. Amazon.com is a great place to find this if you don’t have one. Save that image as “folder.jpg” in the “Terminator” folder. If you don’t have an image it’s ok, Windows Media Center will make a blank tile for you showing just the name of the folder.

3: Start Windows Media Center, go to the “TV+ Movies” group, where you should now see a “DVD Library”, open it. If you’ve never used this before it probably has a couple sample videos in it. Right-click somewhere not on top of one of those videos, and from the popup menu pick “Add Movies”. Go through the steps to select the folders you want to store DVDs in. In this example you’d pick E:\DVDs and it will watch all the sub-folders. NOTE: this watch-list is not the same as the watch-list you set in the settings menu, which confused me for a while till I found this popup menu.

Once Windows Media Center is watching the right root folder, and you have the individual movie folders set up right, they should start showing up in the DVD gallery.

Here is a good posting with some pictures but missing a couple fine details that I included above:

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/Use-Vista-and-Media-Center-to-make-the-best-digital-DVD-library-EVER/