As part of our ongoing baby project – more about that, later – I’m giving up my home office so it can become the eventual nursery.
With no place for my PC, I was forced to come up with a new purpose for it. At the same time I was forced to figure out what to do with the nearly 1,000 movies and TV shows we have on DVD. In a moment of (what I consider) brilliance I stumbled upon the idea of putting together a home theater PC and haven’t looked back since.
I bought a new ATI All-In-Wonder HDMI card, a couple 1 TB internal hard drives, a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, and set out rebuilding my PC. Once the new hardware was in-place and Windows 7 was installed, I went and downloaded MyMovies and DVDFab and began ripping all my DVDs to the vast rolling plains of disk space I had available.
Once a movie is ripped – and one of the great things about MyMovies is that it supports keeping movies in the TS_VIDEO and TS_AUDIO structures and doesn’t require they be converted to .ISO or other formats – you go into MyMovies, search for the name of whatever movie you just ripped, point MyMovies to the location of the files of the ripped movie, and it automatically populates all of the movie metadata automatically.
If you want to watch the movie you just ripped, open Windows Media Center, scroll to the MyMovies plug in, and you’ll see the movie automatically populated there along with an absolute wealth of metadata pulled from IMDB and other movie websites. Click Play and it’s exactly like playing the movie from a DVD, except that it’s faster as there’s no lag time due to DVD seek times.
I haven’t copied all of my movies to the HTPC yet as DVDFab takes about twenty minutes per DVD to rip, but I have entered all of my movie collection into MyMovies. MyMovies allows you to differentiate between online movies (DVDs that have been ripped) and offline movies (DVDs that haven’t been ripped) and in addition to populating movies into WMC it also functions as a really great movie collection manager.
Despite the fact that my movie database has about 900 movies in it and is about 500 MB in size, because it runs in SQL it only takes about two seconds to load in Windows Media Center – not too shabby in my book.
The cherry on top of all this is that MyMovies is free and all of the functionality you really need is included in the free version. It’s possible to expand the functionality by buying points from the developer but there’s nothing in the paid version that I felt I really needed.
I’ll write more about my experiences as I continue to get my feet wet, but now that I have a HTPC up and running well I can no longer see the need to have a dedicated DVD or Blu-Ray player.
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