People need to understand that MyMovies and DVDP are different products intended for different things. I don't know what direction MM intends to take but as it is now, the Collection Management program is very limited compared to DVDP.
If you want to manage your collection tightly and be able to filter on lots of fields and search on this or that then MyMovies isn't for you, at least for now.
I know many people are very sensitive about the accuracy of their database, personally I couldn't care less. What I want to do with my movies is watch them, not watch data about it so I really don't care if there's a few mistakes here and there. I have no need whatsoever for a detail crew section and I can live with a 95% accurate cast section.
As I said in my previous posts, MM is more oriented toward entertainment and playback. The point of MM is to provide data to your Home Theatre system. It works with Windows Media Center and it supports some DVD Changers and certain systems like XBMC Scraper. I really know nothing about changers or XBMC types of systems so I will only talk about Windows Media Center.
The MyMovies database can provide data to WMC two ways. It can feed it's own MC client and it can also feed the default WMC DVD Library. I haven't used the latter so I can't say anything about it for now but if someone wants to know more I can test it this week-end.
The MM Media Center client connects to you MM database wherever you installed it, you only need to configure the program to tell it where your server is. Then you can see your entire collection in a nice graphic interface.
These are some of the ways you can view your collection in MM in Media Center. The background images are provided by users. They call these "Fanarts".
And you can filter on different columns. The Collection Management program also allows you to build filters and store them in the database. You can apply these filters in MyMovies for Media Center later.
Of course you can "open" a title to see the details.
Playback:
In the above picture you can see there's a "play" button. MM allows you to start playback of your movies and watch them in Media Center. This is where the online/offline things comes to sense. If the movie is offline, you will be prompted to insert the disc. If however the movie is stored online it will play it from there. Movies can be stored in different format like .ISO, Folder structures, MPEG or whatever you want, but I will talk about this in another post.
MM doesn't have it's own playback program, it needs to rely on whatever you have in your Media Center. For DVD's it will take the player that is configured as the default one in your MC. If you haven't installed your own it will use Media Centers playback program. Unfortunately WMC doesn't support Blu-Ray or HD-DVD so you will need a program that can play them. MyMovies can use PowerDVD and Arcsoft's Total Media Theatre. I don't know if WinDVD is supported.
The Collection Management program keeps track of the discs that are part of a title, their location type and location.
On the second picture you see the location types. This is how you tell MM if your movie is stored online or offline and whether it's in a folder structure, a single file or on a disc changer. The MyMovies program in media center will use this information and after starting your playback program it will point it to the right source. If you keep your movies in .ISO files then you need to install the free VirtualCloneDrive from SlySoft (makers of AnyDVD) and MyMovies will mount the image in a virtual drive before making this drive the source for playback in your program. When the movie finishes, MM automatically marks it as "Watched" which is a flag that can be used in the filters.
Next post: Ripping movies.
