Many years ago, oddly enough around the time that my daughter started getting interested in kid’s DVDs and i had to replace the Monsters, Inc. DVD about four times I finally decided to rip all my DVDs to a computer with a large hard drive and hook that up to my TV to play the movies on.  No more having to replace scratched or lost DVDs!   Unfortunately, I didn’t really have much of a plan to it – just trying to save some money.

Fast forward to a few days ago.

I reformatted my media server at home and upgraded it to Windows 7.  I took advantage of the situation and scoured the web trying to find some cool things that I could do with Windows Media Center to help organize my movie collection.

And that is what this post is about!  Hopefully someone out there will find it helpful.

The first step was to find cover art for my movies.  For this task, I used DVD Library Manager.  It’s a great utility that will let you search on Amazon or IMDB not just cover images, but also things like director, genre, duration, rating, release year, synopsis, etc.   Of course, Windows Media Center really only cares about the cover art.   I wish there was a way to auto-search and let it grab the first search result by default, much like Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” option, but there isn’t.   So it can get time consuming getting all the cover art.

Download DVD Library Manager here.  Don’t worry, it’s free!

Once that’s done, the next thing I wanted to do was to break up my movies into kid-friendly and not-kid-friendly.   To do this, I used a great plug-in called MediaBrowser.   What MediaBrowser does is basically replace the bundled Media Library in Windows Media Center.   Basically, think of MediaBrowser as working like the Libraries feature in Windows 7.   You can create a new library and add any number of folders to that library.   So, for example, I have half my movies on one drive and half on another so I simply added both drives to a library called “Movies”.

So in all, I have “Kid’s Movies”, “Movies” and “TV Series”.   Then I can even set parental controls, which are a pin code, on any library.  So if my daughter tries to open the “Movies” folder, she’d have to have the pin code…this helps ensure that she watches only the movies that are safe for her to watch.

Another great feature of MediaBrowser?   It’s got built-in support for themes!  So its not only bundled with tons of great features, but it looks pretty sweet too.

Download MediaBrowser here.   And did I mention it’s free?

That’s the extent of my organization to this point, but if anyone has any suggestions for better organizing of WMC, I’d love to hear about it!

Before I end this post, though, I’d like to mention one more thing … and that is the ability to play Hulu on my 360.  It’s pretty great.  I do this with PlayOn, which costs about $39.99.  Pricey, but it works flawlessly.  You can watch the full episodes and clips available online from ESPN, CNN, Fox News, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, NBC, YouTube, CBS, SyFy, SpikeTV, NFL, Channel9, RSS feeds, etc. all on your 360, PS3 or Wii.  So in my case, it works well enough with enough channels for me to justify canceling cable – which makes the $39.99 price tag pay for itself in about a month.

By default, PlayOn plays through the Video Library feature of the Xbox 360.   Want to play PlayOn through WMC?   That can be done, too!  For that, use TubeCore.  It’s a plug-in for WMC that lets you play PlayOn through WMC.  It costs $1.99, so its practically free.   And it offers some things that PlayOn alone doesn’t offer but WMC users are accustomed to, like thumbnail views.