If someone could write up a short set of instructions on how to get this going with MC, I'll post it on the wiki.
I don't use My Movies with Windows Media Center and I'm certainly not an expert in this application. I purely use the included stand-alone tool called "Collection Management" to retrieve meta data from the Internet for my DVD collection. Thanks to recent developments in MC, this data is now automatically used to populate fields when I import new videos.
So, here's how I use My Movies - Collection Management v2.55. The process assumes you have an existing My Movies database. Also, each movie file (mkv, avi, DVD rip etc)
must reside in it's own folder.
1. Open Collection Management
2. Click the "Add Titles" button on the toolbar or choose this option from the "Title" menu
3. In the Add Titles dialog, enter the movie name or DVD bar code and hit the "Search" button
4. In the search results list, select your movie title and hit the "Add Online" button
5. Browse to the folder where your movie resides and hit "Ok" to add your title to the queue of titles on the right
6. When you're done adding titles, click the "Add to..." button
7. My Movies will start downloading meta data for each movie you've added to the queue
At the end of this process, your movie titles will have been added to the My Movies database. This process should have also automatically generated a
hidden mymovies.xml file containing all the relevant movie meta data. These xml files reside in the same folder(s) you chose in step 5 above for each title. Now, here's where the fun starts..... Whenever you import a video with MC that has an accompanying mymovies.xml file, MC will automatically populate all the relevant fields including actors, credits, description etc. If the file was imported previously, you can use the "Update Library (from tags)" feature to re-read the xml at any time. Once you make a change to the tags inside MC and you have video sidecar support enabled, MC will generate a "<video filename>_ext_JRSideCar.xml" file in MPL format. This will be used by MC, rather than the original mymovies.xml file, for ongoing updates to tags.
At this point, I normally just delete the titles from My Movies as the job's complete and I have no intention of maintaining 2 separate video databases. As I said, I really only follow this process for collecting the meta data which is normally just a one time activity.
There is also a setting to create the XML files for all existing database entries.
That's right. If the xml files are not automatically created as I've described above for whatever reason, you can generate them for all My Movies titles by going to the "Configure" menu and choosing "Options -> Meta Data Storage -> Update". Alternatively, you can update individual titles by choosing the "Save Title" button at the bottom of the main screen after selecting a movie from the list on the left.
Cheers.