For a long time I’ve wanted to setup our abnormally large DVD collection in such a way as to have all of our movies available on demand.  Initially I looked at DVD carousels that would hold hundreds of DVDs but quickly learned that our DVD collection was just too big to make that a workable choice for us.

When I switched from using PCs to using a Mac, I found the software Front Row.  It opened my eyes to the possibility of making a home computer into a Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC).  I started searching and found there are many programs like Front Row that are intended to be the front end of a HTPC.  Many of the programs specialize in playing movies and video, but also have capabilities to play music, and show photo slideshows, and other interesting things. 

My search for software was initially focused on OS X solutions and I looked at packages like Plex, Boxee, and XBMC.  The great thing is that the tools that I finally selected have versions for both Windows and OS X.   This turned out to be very important for me as I ultimately decided to use a Acer Aspire Revo, running Windows 7 as my HTPC.

I like the ability to stream TV shows that Boxee provides, but find that for me it does not do as well as others at presenting a large DVD collection.  Ultimately, I settled on using both Boxee, and XBMC.  Most of the time I use XBMC, but when I want to watch a bit of TV, I’ll switch over to Boxee.

XBMC is absolutely amazing.  The ability to “skin” the application to make it look the way I want is brilliant.  It handles large DVD collections with ease, as that is it’s primary purpose.  And it handles my music and photo collections (although not as well as it handles DVDs).

There are many skin options for XBMC.  The one I’ve gravitated to is called Transparency! It is all about showing off the fan art for the movies in the collection.  On our 46 inch TV this software looks incredible.  There are so many add-ons for XBMC that one could make a full time hobby out of trying them all out.  Two that I find particularly useful is the movie trailers plug-in and the home theater experience plug-in.

The Home Theater Experience (HTE) plugin did take some work to get it going, and it took some time to download the content that it uses.  But with the setup and configuration behind me, it is a lot of fun and we use it when ever we are having a movie night event.  The HTE plugin does for your home movies what the theaters do for your movies.  It starts of with a slide show of movie facts and trivia questions.  It then does a welcome video followed by some movie previews.  It shows a sound clip from THX or Dolby Digital, etc. and then launches the movie.  Everything is configurable, from the length of the slideshows, to the number of trailers etc.  The movie trailers can be streamed from the internet to allow for current trailers to be shown even if you’re watching an older movie like Tron.  It can also be setup to select from trailers that are locally stored on your system. This is what I have setup so that I can filter the trailers to keep them more family friendly.  The system tries to select trailers that match the rating of the movie selected, but I’ve found that it is not so good at doing that so I am limiting it more by having it pick from my collection of trailers.

As for building the collection of trailers, I am using a tool called ATD that downloads all the new HD trailers as they are released to the Apple site. I review the trailers downloaded and then remove any that are not suitable for younger viewers.  I’ve got a scheduled task that runs each night.  Works pretty well.

Other aspects of this project included finding and selecting the right software to import my DVD collection, and what hardware was going to be the actual HTPC.  See my other blog posts for information on those topics.