Since this article a flurry of Metadata tools have come along to fill the void in Media Center’s Movie Library Synopsis view including DVD Library Manager, MediaScout, My Movie Finder, YAMMM, Media Center Master and more! To find the latest on Metadata downloading programs and tools check out our Metadata articles and guides or subscribe to the Metadata RSS feed to stay on top of the latest releases.

Adding that extra information to your native Movie Library inside Windows 7 Media Center is currently a cumbersome process for those of us who don’t have the space to store the entire DVD contents to our hard drives. Most of us prefer to use compression such as AVI, MPG or MKV files to store our DVD files to our hard drives saving us both space and money on storage. The problem this presents inside the Movie Library, however, is we lose all that valuable extra information 7MC pulls down from the internet for DVDs.

There is a solution to this problem though. The solution at the moment can be a bit tedious as there aren’t any software solutions that can be used to scrape the proper information to your hard disk automatically like you could formerly do with My Movies. It seems that for now the information that My Movies pulls down isn’t compatible with Windows 7’s Media Center. There is an alternative source for these valuable XML files but it’s a rough ride if you have a big collection.

The best alternative source for the dvdid.xml files that 7MC uses to pull down this extra information is a website called dvdxml.com. As mentioned, however, using this method is far from a simple processes if you have a large movie collection. At present you have to sign up for dvdxml.com then search their database for your movie titles. After locating your movie in their database you simply download the xml file to the folder your movie is stored in. One thing to note with this method is that your movies should also be stored in separate folders, which is generally good practice anyway.

As mentioned, this process can take quite a while for those of us with larger movie collections but at the present it seems to be the only reliable method to collect the proper dvdid.xml files used by 7MC. Hopefully the future will bring us an application to pull down this information automatically and save us some precious time.