Getting the latest movie trailers with Trailer Library
by Michael Healy @ 11:15 am on June 11th, 2010 in trailers with 20 Comments
Getting the latest film trailers inside Windows 7 Media Center seems like a perfect fit for something so focused on entertainment on the big screen. Unfortunately, it’s something that’s also been mostly left out of the native Media Center product. A relatively new entry, Trailer Library, from MediaPCTycoon on The Green Button forums let’s you stream movie trailers from Filmtrailers.com directly into Windows Media Center. Filmtrailers.com is primarily focused on the UK and European market however, so users in the States may want to take a look at other options such as My Trailers 2 or My Movies 3.
To install Trailer Library head over to the Green Button forums post and hit the download link to get the latest version. Install the plugin and open up Windows 7 Media Center. The plugin should appear in the Extra’s Library and can be launched from there.
For European users you can select your locale from the Settings menu at the top of the screen. Simply select Settings, mark the radio box next to your location and select the Continue button. This should change the source of the trailers being downloaded from Filmtrailers.com and give you a more localized selection (as well as your native language in the details).
Inside the main interface select from three options: Latest Trailers, In Cinemas and Coming Soon to narrow down the results. Then in the main strip displaying movie covers select the title to get trailers for and somewhat counter-intuitively you’ll need to press down to select from the available trailers for the title. Though it may have been more intuitive to simply have a small listing of the available trailers as opposed to this strip method it does get the job done.
Another small drawback to the current interface is the inability to select the description and scroll down to read any text that may get cut off. It also tends to be somewhat repetitive and unnecessary for movies with only a single trailer available. Though despite these few shortcomings Trailer Library is very effective at getting movie trailers into the Media Center interface. Users will be hard pressed to do much better than this, especially those looking for European listings. Hopefully we’ll continue to see further development of this plugin in the future.
