Video Browser for vista MCE

Video Browser has gone open source and now has a new home:

Discussions are at bbs.wasnotwas.com Downloads are at: google code

Video Browser is a plug-in for Windows Vista Media Center. It provides a simple interface to your videos.

Screenshots

My Todo List

• Watched / Unwatched tracking, so I can just launch it and look through the videos I have not yet watched. (implementing this properly is tricky, what happens if two people share the same media center)

• More details about a TV show when selected (instead of playing it right away)

• Add a user configuration section.

FAQ

I can’t see the “by genre” and “by runtime” sort options whats up?

These options will only show up if more than 30% of the files in your folder have mymovies metadata. (it looks for the mymovies.xml file)

I have a lot of files in my directories, I want to be able to quickly navigate through the list

Try pressing the remote number keys, it will quickly skip through the list.

How do I get metadata (pictures and info) for my videos?

For TV shows: use the ruby scraper

For Movies use mymovies or KingManon’s MetaBabel or Salami’s Movie organizer

Alternatively, you can add in metadata yourself (extract from tgb thanks to oxford rob) Say you have a folder d:\tv\heroes\season1 Create a folder called metadata ie : d:\tv\heroes\season1\metadata In this folder create xml files with the same names as the .avi files in the directory above this. ie in the Season1 folder I may have a file “S01 E02 – Don’t look back.avi” in the metadata folder I then should have a file “S01 E02 – Don’t look back.xml”.

The contents is then something like:

 
<Item>
<EpisodeName>This is the episode name or film name</EpisodeName>
<Overview>This items description of the tv episode or film</Overview>
<filename>episodes/your image.jpg</filename>
<SeasonNumber>Season number or perhaps actors</SeasonNumber>
<ShowName>Name of show or perhaps you could put genre</ShowName>
</Item> 

How do I choose an image for my movie genre?

Just add a file named [Genre].jpg to the folder containing the movies. So, if you want an Image for the Comedy genre, add a file called “Comedy.jpg”

I go to video browser and see no videos, what is going on?

Try creating shortcuts from your user video directory (on my system C:\Users\sam\Videos) to all your videos.

The latest version is: http:/code.google.com/p/videobrowser/downloads

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