Sure, an extra DVD might not cure cancer or solve world peace, but it sure is a nice gesture from a company that works really hard for customer loyalty.

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.

Now there is a “movies” menu front and center in Media Center’s start menu.

Selecting the “Movie Library” item shows the following screen.  I started taking screenshots of the process of adding the DVD’s into the library, but the process was so “duh” obvious that I decided to leave the process out.

After I told Media Center where the DVDs were it found all of them and put them in the menu for me to play.

Selecting a DVD brings up a menu about the DVD.  (This menu is the same template as for selecting an album in a list of music or a video in a list of videos.)  There seems to be a lot of room for metadata.  I don’t know how that is supposed to work, but hopefully there’s more to come.

Pressing right bring up a list of actions, which for DVDs apparently only lets me edit the disk title.

When I select “restart” my experience is just as though I put in a DVD, except more responsive.  I have found that skipping around in the video is much more responsive in this version of Media Center, as compared with Vista’s.

After holding right for a seconds, the selector switches from jumping from one item to the next slowly to this new scrolling mode in Media Center.  I forget it’s specific name, but what it does is great.  All of the items in the background fade out a little and wizz by, while only a few items show up slowly on top.  This allows the user to jump to the general area of an item in a big list.  When the user lets go of the left or right button, the item shown in the forground is left selected, and the items in the background fade back in.  The whole process is very well animated and seems useful as well.

However, this still is a beta after all, so currently in the Windows 7 beta if the DVD that it selects to show in the foreground begins with “The”, media center will select those letters as the current position.  It’s nice that Media Center ignores words like “the” in it’s alphabetizing algorithm, but the guys who wrote the quick scrolling feature didn’t seem to get the memo.  I’m sure this will be fixed by the time the Release Candidate is released.

Another nifty new feature of Media Center in Windows 7 is that the user can now, finally, change the position of the video by clicking and dragging the position indicator.  It’s acceptable that this wasn’t possible in the past; Media Center is primarily intended to be used on a couch with a remote control, but it’s nice that Media Center is getting this feature as well.  (Side note: Media Center is also receiving many touch-related features, but more on that later.)

I wonder if this thing supports ripped BluRay disks…  I’ll have to investigate.

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.