Microsoft is actively trying to kill WMC, even on Windows 7. They have started stripping out functionality. Recently they removed the ability to download new metadata. Eventually WMC will be unusable.

As a replacement for WMC, you should try Chameleon MediaCenter. CMC is designed to work with My Movies, and it has support for all the popular players: PowerDVD (any version), DVDFab Player 5, Media Player Classic (MPC), VLC, even the Windows 10 Movies & TV.

CMC works on Windows 7/8.1, but was designed for and works best on Windows 10. In addition to working with My Movies, it also has a built-in Music Library inspired by WMC.

Best of all, CMC is still being maintained, and regularly has new features added. I should know... I'm the author.

Paul

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Chameleon MediaCenter (CMC) v7.0 - A FREE WMC replacement GUI for My Movies Collection Management on Win7/8.1/10/11, plus a Music Library and App Launcher!

I use CMC and it is in my opinion the replacement for WMC and is designed to work with MyMovies.

AS of Powerdvd 16, Cyberlink stopped support of WMC. There used to be a plugin installed by Powerdvd prior to Powerdvd 16 so you can't use 17, or 18 that works that way anymore. You can get Mymovies to setup Powerdvd as an external player, but as Paul mentioned, MS will eventually kill WMC on windows 7 much like they crippled windows player recently. Some say turn off updates but that means you are at risk for virus' unless you quarantine you machine from the internet. https://betanews.com/2019/01/27/microsoft-windows7-media-player.

CMC can be found here.

https://chamconsoft.com/cmc/features.html

brother_hood, you seem to think that other people have the same setup and expertise as you. Telling someone to disable updates and that they have to be a target to get hacked is not true for some that may not have your windows expertise. If you are not protected and should go to the wrong site you could get hosed especially if you download something to your unprotected machine and open the file you downloaded.

TMT stopped being produced several years ago and is not useful to some one new to Mymovies or PC movie playback. The OP's only option is to use powerdvd as an external player in mymovies if they want to use WMC. They could use a free player like MPC too, I guess, or some other free player.

Wow guys...this is a lot of info. I will look into CMC but I am a little bummed given that I just bought a new Rack amount PC built on win7. I pulled the trigger on my new PC because my after upgrading my Monster Rig to Win10 I couldn’t make anything work well.

Will CMC work ok with Win 7?

If I click BluRay coverArt in CMC will it seamlessly launch from within the app?

BTW you guys are great. Very generous with your knowledge and expertise. It is greatly appreciated

CMC works on Win7, Win8.x, and Win10.

There is a small limitation on Win7/8.x, though. CMC has a built-in remote control button programmer, so you can configure the buttons on your MCE compatible remote to launch CMC, and to close your external players like PowerDVD. The problem is that if WMC is installed, Windows prevents the reassignment of certain buttons like the "Green Windows Button", "My TV", "My Music", "Recorded TV", etc., since these are reserved for WMC. So on Windows 7/8.x with WMC, you have fewer buttons that can be programmed. On Windows 10 without WMC, all of the buttons can be reprogrammed.

And that's it. Pretty much everything else works identically across all Windows versions. You can even run CMC on Windows 7 side by side with WMC. So if you want to give CMC a try, it only takes a minute to install, then just point it at your media folders, sync, browse, and play. You can flip back and forth between WMC and CMC to compare them to your heart's content. If you don't like CMC, just delete the folder and it's gone. (to be fair, your results with CMC are directly impacted by how well maintained you keep your My Movies meta-data. You may have some cleanup steps to go through to get your meta-data all up to date and ready for CMC)



Yes, though as Jamie pointed out you are "clicking" with the remote control or the Enter key on your keyboard. I recently added mouse clicking to the settings menu, and a user just tested this on a Microsoft Surface with a touchscreen. He reported that the settings menu worked perfectly with a touchscreen, so I'm excited to add mouse support to the main GUI, which will make it touch enabled too!

But I think the important part of your question was the "seamlessly" part. When you click to play a movie or TV Show Episode, CMC automatically mounts the ISO if it is a rip, or directly plays the DVD/Blu-ray Folder or encoded video file, all seamlessly. It just works. This works for DVDs, Blu-rays, UHD 4K Blu-rays, in ISO or Folder formats, and a ton of different encoded video formats.

I even let you configure different players for different media types. For example, you could configure it to play Blu-rays with PowerDVD, DVD's with MPC, UHD 4K with DVDFab Player, DVD Episodes with VLC, Blu-ray Episodes with PowerDVD, WTV with PowerDVD, and other encoded media with Win10 Movies & TV.

That's right, you're not stuck with a single player, but rather you can use all of them, choosing the best one for each type of media. I know that sounds complicated, but it is super easy to configure in the settings menu.

Paul

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Chameleon MediaCenter (CMC) v7.0 - A FREE WMC replacement GUI for My Movies Collection Management on Win7/8.1/10/11, plus a Music Library and App Launcher!

I have a fond memory as a child going to Epcot's World of Tomorrow. What I remember most is seeing a TV that looked clear as reality, as if you were simply looking through a pane of glass into another world, and not at a screen. It was at that moment I became a videophile. 3D and 120Hz have been gimmicks, but 4K and HDR are solid technology improvements. 8K is next, and is already happening.

I would definitely agree, if you're in the market for a LARGE TV, 4K is the way to go. I don't have a 4K TV myself, but they are certainly in my future. For smaller TV's, it probably doesn't really matter. Ultimately it comes down to how large your TV is, how far away you sit from it, and the sharpness of your eyesight. If the TV is too small, or you sit too far away, or you have less than 20/20 vision, you probably won't enjoy the benefits of 4K. Also, if the majority of what you watch is classic films that haven't been remastered, 4K probably won't make a difference. You're right, the improvement from 1080p to 4K (4x) is not nearly as large as the improvement from 480p to 1080p (6x), and since 1080p is already reaching the limits of our visual acuity for smaller screens, that 4x improvement of 4K won't always be realizable.

But on a big screen, it is a must have. At my previous home, I had a Full-HD projector and a 12' (144") screen. It was easy to see the pixels when sitting about 12' from the screen (1:1). The next time I do a projector, I definitely want 4K. Actually, I want an 8K projector, but reality dictates that 4K is all I can hope for.

Currently on my office PC, I have 3 27" 4K screens, and while testing CMC I sometimes have to watch movies (tough job, but I make the sacrifices). So I have been able to watch some 4K content, and it's great.

Most of my occasional movie purchases are newer movies, and where possible I now try to buy the 4K version. Amazon often has sales where they will sell them 3 for $50, and at that price I appreciate the upgrade in quality, even if I really am buying for the future. Streaming platforms are great and all, but they apply so much compression that I feel I see a nice quality improvement going with a physical disc over streaming.

Gaming has always been plagued by the jaggies. Of course, in retro 8-bit gaming, jaggies are a feature, but as modern games try to look more and more realistic, aliasing artifacts become a bigger problem. Up to now, the main way to deal with jagged edges has been in post processing routines with different types of anti-aliasing. But another way is to simply jack up the resolution so that the jaggies are too small to see. In fact, that is how some anti-aliasing routines work - for example they might render the image at 4K, then scale back down to 1080p, with the pixel averaging routines smoothing out the jaggies. So if you're heavy into gaming, a 4K TV is awesome, even smaller ones. But for PC gaming, I think the issue is more about getting DirectX 12 and newer hardware, which works better for many games, regardless of what resolution you're running.

Do you know which is the biggest gaming platform in the world? Many would think PlayStation or Xbox or Switch, but in reality it is the PC. I'm sure if you filtered for "living room use on a TV" that would put consoles back in the lead, but that's mainly because PC's are inconvenient to use in the living room. I think Steam (and perhaps other services) has gone a long way towards eliminating that issue. I can fire up Steam, grab my gamepad controller, and then browse around my game collection and play games. It's almost as good as a console, plus if I have a monster PC I can do high-quality 4K gaming with all the eye candy turned on, putting all the consoles to shame. The problem that still exists in my mind is how do you switch between Steam (or Epic, or GoG or etc.) and your media library. After all, if you've got a honkin' PC attached to your monster TV in your living room (or theater or den or wherever) then you probably want to watch some flix too. Since I was able to decently integrate with external video players like PowerDVD, I see no reason I can't so the same with these gaming platforms.

And this is exactly what I thought MS was going to do - create one app to unite them all. They could have done it better than I could ever hope to achieve, but since they decided not to do it, then I'm giving it my all.


You're spot on about the HDHomeRun being a network tuner and how awesome that is. I was able to put mine in a back bedroom on the upper floor, where the signal is best and the antenna is hidden from view. Then I can stream my content from the HDHomeRun to any and all PC's in the house, including the basement. It truly is a brilliant solution. They just announced a new version at CES that includes the storage for DVR recording, making it even easier to set up, and adds commercial skipping, but I've heard rumors that the API doesn't work on it. Hope the rumors are wrong.



To be honest, I'm not really sure what's truly desirable about the Windows 10 Movies & TV. It is pre-installed, and it does work nicely. I do have at least one CMC user that has purchased a lot of movies in the Movies & TV app, and he lists them in My Movies, and displays them in CMC, and if I'm not mistaken he even uses CMC to play them directly in the Movies & TV app!!! Now isn't that cool, launching a movie purchased online and streaming it from the comfort of CMC! I'm not exactly sure how he got this to work, but I think he put the URL or path to the purchased movie into My Movies, which imports into CMC, and when CMC calls Movies & TV it passes that same path back to it, and voila movietime!


It does seem like Microsoft has tried to push users toward the Xbox, but at the same time they seem to be avoiding anything related to tuners, program guides, and DVR (and now meta-data). I think that there were (or still are) ongoing expenses that they incur to provide these services, and that there's just not a return on investment for them. The only way to get out of these recurring expenses is to start disabling the services that use them, i.e. kill WMC. It's one of the reasons I've had to be particular in choosing what features to add to CMC, as anything that incurs an ongoing service expense can't be included. That's another thing that attracted me to the HDHomeRun - here's a standalone product that is doing all that for me, and essentially all I have to do is subscribe CMC to the API service on that device. I don't have to pay any service fees, or worse worry about collecting fees. To be clear, HDHomeRun on CMC isn't working yet, but it is a work in progress.

Paul

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Chameleon MediaCenter (CMC) v7.0 - A FREE WMC replacement GUI for My Movies Collection Management on Win7/8.1/10/11, plus a Music Library and App Launcher!