My Movies Monitor
Introduction
My Movies Monitor will automatically identify movie folders in your Windows Home Server's video libraries, and add high quality meta-data to to the titles, making the meta-data available to numerous Media Center software products, as well as storing a folder image for the movie folders when browsing the folders with Windows Explorer.
The data will be stored directly in the movie folder as an XML file, front and back cover image files, as well as a folder.jpg file, making the data openly available to any program that supports them, including My Movies, Media Center's DVD library, using the "DVD library Connector", Media Portal, XBMC, Niveus Movie Library and Open Media Library for Windows Media Center.
When identifying a title, the movie monitoring feature will add an entry to it's identification list, giving you an overview of which folders were identified as which titles, and letting you see how the title was identified, for details, see "Identification Methods" below.
Identification Methods
Several unique identification models and operating modes ensures the best possible identification method for your movie folders. If movies have previously been added or edited from a My Movies client, the data already stored in the movie folder will be used, seen as "Data in folder" in the identification window. If there is no existing data in the folder, such as for a title copied directly to the home server, different identification methods will be used, based on the video format.
The recommended format for DVD's, the VIDEO_TS folder format, will uniquely be identified based on calculated identification information based on the DVD structure, called "Online Id". This method ensures a perfect unique identification based on the actual DVD structure, which is unique to each individual title, and works even if the VIDEO_TS folder structure is edited, such as when removing extra material.
For other formats, the monitoring function will look for an ".NFO" file added by some programs, that contains an IMDB id for the title - this IMDB id will be used to match the title against the My Movies WebService.
If the video format is not a VIDEO_TS folder, and an ".NFO" containing an IMDB id is not found, the folder name will be used to identify the title - by default, the monitoring function operates in a "Strict" mode, allowing it only to add meta-data if the folder name can be exactly matched against a title in our service. The operating mode can be changed to "Loose", that lets the monitor function make a best guess on the folder name against our service, resulting in the best possible match - the "Loose" operating mode can in some situations depending on how accurate your folder naming is detect an incorrect title, while with "Strict" mode, no data will be added if the title does not match fully. Please see below how to use a My Movies Client to change or improve data.
Changing or Improving Data
In the situation where the monitor function could not locate data for your title, or in the rare situation where a title is incorrectly identified, you can install a My Movies Client on a client machine, and connect it to the Windows Home Server, allowing you to use the "Change Title Source and Data" function to manually search for the title in our sevice.
Using the My Movies Client, you can also edit or improve your data, if data parts is missing on the added movie profile, and you can contribute your improvements back to the service, and earn contribution points to unlock advanced features in the software.
Advanced Meta-Data
The advanced, and high quality meta-data added by the My Movies Monitor feature is provided from My Movies own WebService, our community build data service, where thousand of users takes part in ensuring accurate and high quality data. Data is downloaded from our multiple highly stable and very fast professional servers, hosted in Denmark, by our high quality professional hosting partner Fuzion, to ensure that you always get the highest quality meta-data at all times a day.
By connecting a My Movies Client to your Windows Home Server, you can yourself take part in the community, and further improve meta-data, not only for your own titles, but for all users of our service.
Pricing
My Movies Monitor is free, and the only requirement is that you create a My Movies user account to be able to use it. Our hopes is that supplying this product for free will encourage users to improve our meta-data WebService in cases where the data can be improved using a My Movies Client connected to the home server.
