This is a bit of a follow up on my previous article on how to play VIDEO_TS and VOB files in Windows 7 Media Center. The first time I focused mainly on how to play the DVD rips using the Media Browser plug-in for WMC. This time around, I’m going to focus specifically on ripping your DVD to play in the native Windows 7 Media Center Movie Library.

Once again, I’m going to use DVDFab’s HD Decrypter to rip the DVD, but we’re going to adjust some settings so that HD Decrypter creates an xml file that we can use to automatically pull cover art and metadata for our movie collection in the native Movie Library.

Simply ripping a DVD to your hard drive without compressing / converting it is going to result in significantly higher file size than if you ripped your file to Mp4 using h.264, or AVI using DivX, etc. However, using this method you’ll be able to play the full contents of the DVD just as if the DVD was sitting in your DVD drive. This way you do have to worry about digging through your DVD collection every time you want to play a movie. Plus, you don’t have to mess around with mounting it as a drive like you do with ISO files.

Rip the DVD

We’ll rip the DVD using DVD Fab’s HD Decrypter, but first we’ll change a few settings. In the common settings, set the Default output type to DVD Folder and check the box for Create dvdid.xml which can be used by Windows Media Center.

When you are finished, copy the top level folder and subfolders, including the xml file to your WMC Movie Library.

When you’re finished you’ll have nice cover art and detailed synopsis to go along with your movie. Awesome!