I recently decided to try out Windows Media Center. Instead of spending money on a cheap, small HTPC and setting up Windows Media Center, XBMC, or something else I figured the easiest way would just be to use my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. So I went about finally setting up Windows Media Center on my new installation on Windows 7.

I found the movie browsing rather lacking, basically just a big grid of all the movies I have. I hardly had any DVD covers so the presentation was a bit lacking. So through searching for ways to spiff it up a bit I stumbled upon a plugin named Media Browser (http://www.mediabrowser.tv/). I also found a great program for automatically populating cover art, background art, and all of the metadata you need for Media Browser to work well with your movie collection. It’s called Media Center Master (http://www.mediacentermaster.com/). It takes a bit of organizing your movies into folders to get it to work properly but it is worth it.

Here is how my movie browsing looked before:

And here is how it looked after installing Media Browser, organizing my movies, and using Media Center Master to fill out the metadata:

default

You can customize it by changing wallpapers, changing the icons, changing the way your folders are layed out, and many other things. It makes it possible to browse your movies in a standard grid, in a strip, in a list, and even in a nice looking coverflowish layout like above.

strip

list

Once you select your movie, it brings you to the details screen where you can see information on the movie and the actors.

movie

If you go and select an actor it will show you a selection of movies that actor has performed in.

actor

You can group your movies into sections by year, genre, director, studio, and more.

genre

It also works great for TV series.

tv

I highly recommend this plugin. If you have any other must have plugins or ways to enhance Windows Media Center let me know in the comments.

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