PCA Forums

I'm wondering how all of you using Media Center (MCE) who are ripping DVDs to a server or NAS are dealing with metadata info?

I have three MCEs, one on each of my three TVs, and I've got an UNRAID box that I'm filling up with ripped copies of my DVDs over time, and there's enough in there now that it's hard to find what you're looking for. Yeah I have the full title and year of the movie in the folder's file name, and a FOLDER.JPG file in the DVD's folder with the cover art, but that just gives you a big long alphabetic list of cover art to wade through, and tells you nothing about the movie itself.

Now I know if you have metadata enabled, and configure the MCE to pull the metadata from IMDB, you can sort by genre which is REALLY nice (MCE supports multiple genres for a DVD) and get summaries. However it takes a while for that info to get downloaded. It's always slow to come up because (I assume) it wants to ping IMDB EVERY TIME I want to read the summary for a movie.

What I REALLY wanted was to store the metadata on the NAS with the VOB file and cover are, and have MCE pull it off that WITHOUT pulling that info off the Internet every time you want to read a synopsis, and I also wanted consistent metadata across all three of my media center PCs in case I wanted to modify some of the metadata myself (for instance, make changes to the genre categories or the summary, or add metadata to a home made DVD like our vacation DVDs).

I have spent the whole day researching this. Very interesting shit. As usual Microsoft does things in a painful and awkward way just to make your life totally miserable.

You would THINK that the metadata could be stored on the NAS in each DVD's folder (like I'm already doing for the cover art), but NOOOOO that would be too logical and straight forward. I really love MCE, but Microsoft does do things in a stupid way. Why bother having the ability to store media on network drives, but not have the ability to store the metadata on the network drive with the media?

Instead MCE stores the metadata in a personal cache folder locally on each MCE PC. Specifically in two folders under C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\eHome. One folder contains cover art and the other contains the metadata XML file which contains the title, genre, summary, cast, etc).

Yup, you read this right. The metadata is local to a SPECIFIC USER on the MCE. So if there were two users on that MCE, they would each have two separate and different metadata caches, even if they were both watching DVD files from the same hard drive.

Then there is a DVDID.XML placed in the DVD's folder on the NAS that contains an ID# that points to the proper metadata file.

As far as I have been able to tell, there is no avoiding having to store the metadata locally on each MCE PC - not without using a plugin and I want to keep these MCEs pristine without adding any extra services.

Soooooo what I wound up doing, and just finished testing, and works great (it just seems awkward) is that I download the metadata and cover art automatically using a handy free app called Media Center Master (there's a paid Pro version that adds more features, and I will pay for it just to help the guy out, but it doesn't seem like I really need any of the Pro features).

It's a nice app that will scan my DVD folder on the NAS from my workstation, and then download all the metadata and cover art, save it all to the proper folders automatically, and creates the DVDID.XML file and saves it to the DVD folder on the NAS. The trouble is that the metadata and cover art is now stored locally on my workstation's eHome folder and not on the MCE PCs. So in other words if I used MCE on my workstation (which I don't) I would see all the summaries, cast and cover art, but I won't see it on the MCE PCs because they don't have their own local copies.

To get around that I just wrote a batch file that XCOPYs all the metadata and cover files to the proper folders on all three MCE PCs. So every time I rip new DVDs to the NAS, I have to run Media Center Master to download the metadata and then execute the batch file to copy it to all the MCEs.

It's an awkward implementation, but it works, and it's fast and easy. The metadata comes up instantly in MCE.

So what are you guys doing about metadata, if anything?

LOL, I looked into it & just gave up. There are all kinds of things that Media Center could be if they would just put someone who cared in charge of it. Unfortunately, it sounds more & more like they're dropping all support.