Storing your Media Center DVD’s on a large Hard Disk or Disks
This is how to store
your DVD’s on a large disk or disks and view them using Media Center. It does
not use or required Window Home Server.
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For
each DVD that you have, use a program such as DVDFab Decrypter to copy the disk image on to hard disk (there are
many others). This will give you a set of DVD folders, the innermost of which
will contain VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. Rename this containing folder
to a suitable name for your DVD. Depending on the consumer of this DVD content,
this folder name may show up, so be consistent with your naming. There is no need to consider converting to
another file format.
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Obtain
an image to go with this DVD. There are two ways of doing this. First, go to
the site www.dvdxml.com and type in your DVD name. If this site hold info on
your DVD, download the small XML file that you will be offered. Place this file
alongside VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS in the DVD folder. This file will allow Media
Center to show you a lot of info about the DVD and display a picture. If the
site does not know about your DVD, then you must place an image of your own
into the folder – called FOLDER.JPG. Get this image either by scanning your DVD
cover, or by going to a site that sells DVD’s and right-clicking the relevant
DVD image and using ‘Save Picture As’. You may need to crop the image too.
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Your
DVD folder is now finished and you can place it onto a large hard disk that is
visible to a Media Center. Note – cluster your DVD folders in a specific tree
on the hard disk, not in with other media files since media center takes ages
to search through folders. By having a ‘DVD’ tree, you can make this a share
and then declare that share alone as the DVD library – see below.
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Now
configure Media Centre to see the DVD tree (or trees). Follow one of the many links to enable DVD
Library on Media Center such as
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/930526. Finally, open this DVD
Library, choose the settings and nominate your DVD tree share as the source for
material. If you have more than one large disk, add a share for each tree on
each disk.
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Finally,
after maybe 30 sec for Media Center to scan the tree you should see all of your DVD’s as pictures from which you can select and
play any DVD. The DVD’s that have XML info will also have a comprehensive
description of the film and cast.