A new version of Video Browser for Vista MCE
over 2 years ago
Here is a very rough initial release of my video browsing plugin for Vista MCE. It seems pretty functional though it still does have a few quirks.
New in this release:
- Supports metadata for both TV shows and movies
- DVD playback direct from the hard disk
- Native Vista MCE plug-in (ported from XBAP for MCML) – Meaning the remote and scaling should work better


The installer is available here.
I have not tested this on XBOX extenders or Vista X64.
To get metadata for your movies use MyMovies
To get metadata for your TV shows use the following ruby script.
You will have to install Ruby first and type: Ruby scraper.rb [Path for TV shows] in the command line.
The Ruby script is provided as is to the community using the public domain licensing Sqlite uses. The script contains a useful command line switch which will rename your videos to a more human readable format. It uses thetvdb as the source for its meta data.
There are quite a few areas in the plugin that need improvement, I will address them in a future version:
- Navigation between listview, sorting area and now playing window needs to be improved – it does not work in a predictable way.
- First time you navigate to a page the thumbnail on the left is not refreshed.
- When holding down the up or down remote buttons continuously it does not zoom through the list.
- I lost my new videos section (this was an areas that sorted the entire collection by date)
- Not displaying all the available metadata
Hope you enjoy this, please feel free to comment or post any suggestions.
Leo
over 2 years ago
And here are my suggestions.
1. Would like to have the option to remove the space at the bottom reserved for descriptions. For me it is just wasted space, and it means less visible files.
2. Possibly reduce the amount of white space between files, so more files are visible (again). I tend to have 40-50 videos in one folder
3. Differentiate between folders and files with a graphic.
I am a long time user of XBMC:
http://xbmc.sourceforge.net/imgs/xbmc_alpha/xbmc_alpha_screenshot_mayhem37.jpg
Thanks again.