A while ago I got some extra storage and since I have been ripping full DVDs left and right.  I wrote a piece of software, DVD Cover Art Finder, to find cover art for the DVDs, and now I am expanding that program’s feature set to include creating a mirror copy of the full DVDs as M4V files that the Xbox 360 can play.  My efforts aren’t all that special… I just send the correct parameters to the HandBrake CLI, which takes care of the hard stuff.  This development version of DVD CAF saves key information about the rip, such as what settings it was created with and where it is stored, so that in the future I can add an option to re-transcode the videos with another preset.  I might need to get another hard drive for my Windows Home Server!

Download DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.1.0.0 here

Download DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.1.0.0 (source code) here

This release of DVD Cover Art Finder includes the ability to save the list of DVDs as an HTML document for printing or posting on a website.  (I copied the HTML into a Facebook note to document my list of DVDs.)  In addition, now the user can right-click on an item in the list of DVDs to play the DVD, open the DVD’s folder, or delete the DVD.

This version also has the “Load Automatically” option for cover art disabled by default.  In using the program, that caught me up a lot.  It also has a few simple look-and-feel updates.  For example, the DVDs in the list of DVDs no longer display empty square brackets if the DVD has no disk label.

For more information about how to use DVD Cover Art Finder, check out the post about version 1.0.0.0.

Download DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.0.0.0 here

Download DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.0.0.0 Source Code here (open with Visual C# 2008 Express)

This usage tutorial begins with the DVD already properly ripped to the hard drive.  I’ll have to make a tutorial about how to do that later, but for now you could use the tutorial that I used to learn how to do that. (link)

First, download and open DVD Cover Art Finder, duh! (note that I made two minor changes to the program since I did the tutorial.  Can you spot them?)

Next, click “Scan for DVDs”.

Select the folder where you store all of your DVDs and click OK.

Select the DVD of which you want to get cover art.  (notice how the DVDs that lack cover art show up at the top of the list.)

Be patient, and DVD Cover Art Finder will show cover art, which is currently picked from Amazon.com.  If the right cover art doesn’t show up, edit the Title text box and click the “(re)load coverart” button.

Click the cover art that looks right.  This will put the cover art in the image box in the Selected DVD group box and update the Title text box with the title of that DVD.

Edit the title box if necessary.

Click the “Save” button.  This will save the cover art to the DVD’s folder, as well as rename the DVD’s folder to match the title.  Saving also creates a data file to keep track of the information and places that in the DVD’s folder.

Great!  Now the DVD shows up in Media Center with the right title and cover art.

I hopped to get it out today, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Here’s a quick jump forward to the final product:

 Amazon has a great set of web services available from aws.amazon.com, and one of the services enables integration with Amazon’s online store.  Best of all, the sample code was written in C#, which is my programming language of choice.  The API itself is very easy to use and quite powerful, but enough of that.

My program, which I quickly decided to call DVD Cover Art Finder (very creative), uses the Amazon Associates Web Service to suggest 6 possible cover arts.  When the user selects one of the choices, the selection is shown in the bigger image box, and the dvd title is updated to the title as listed on Amazon.  I added in a bunch of quick keyboard shortcuts to make the process go a lot faster, which I really needed since I used the software to get 200+ cover arts.  The program also renames the DVD’s folder to the DVD title, and preserves the DVD disk label and some other information in a data file that it keeps in the DVD’s folder.

As you can clearly see, I haven’t put much effort into polishing the product yet (note the window’s title of Form1).  Using it to get a bunch of cover art, however, the thing is stable.

I’ll be finalizing this at some point and publish it to my blog, including the source code.  For now just marvel. 

FYI, Media Center also supports three ways to display the DVDs.  The one previously shown is “View Large”.  This one below is “View Small”, and there is a third option that I don’t find very useful called “View List”.

Selecting a DVD shows the disk’s location and and bigger cover art.

Playing the DVD is exactly the same experience as playing a physical DVD, except there’s no disk.