Where's my Movie Data?? - Media Management

I know it's been a while since I posted on here, but I have been busy checking out and learning all kinds of things. My biggest time suck lately has been a combination of Windows 7 (Win7) with its Windows Media Center (WMC), Windows Home Server (WHS), and XBOX 360 as a media "extender" of sorts. There are lots of pieces to Win7 and WHS that I have been spending time learning, but I'm going to mainly focus on media content for this post. Future posts will discuss the other, more geeky, features and functions of these two operating systems.

As you may have read in a previous post of mine, I purchased a Roku and have loved that device for playing back Netflix content. However, Netflix's library for instant play is pretty limited, so I wanted something more. I was able to talk my wife into letting me get a 2nd XBOX 360 to place in the living room (the 1st one is in the family room) as a replacement for the DVD player, Roku and then even adds gaming. She bought into it because it let her get the current DVD player for her bedroom and my daughter get the Roku (the other biggest user besides me) for her bedroom.

Now that I have my 360 as my media extender, I started to dig in to see what it is capable of. I have to say I was impressed! The Netflix experience from the 360 is, in my opinion, leaps and bounds better than the Roku experience. That's not to say the Roku experience isn't good, because it's great! That's just saying that the 360 is even better!! However, where my experience kind of fell short, again in my opinion, was browsing my video file library or even using the 360 as a Media Center Extender. This is because, while I may have hundreds of video files of movies, they only show up as names with NO details like box art, rating, actors, genre, etc. While this wasn't necessarily "tragic", it made browsing movie files more tedious and almost impossible for my kids. I figure it would be SOOO much easier to see box art for the movies because it's easier to discern what a movie is or is about by a picture... AND, having the rating information and possibly a description would be helpful in stuff I haven't watched yet to say yes or no to the kids watching it without me.

What I found interesting, or possibly what spawned my search for the solution to this, was that *some* of the titles in my library showed up with ALL of this information in Media Center... and I mean all of it (box art, actors, genre, rating, a description of what the movie is about, etc). My guess is that metadata was added in some way to those files (they all happened to be WMV files in this case), but I wasn't sure HOW it was added or how I could add it to other files I have.

I am still looking for the correct solution to this dilemma, so I will certainly be posting back with more info as I find it. Unfortunately I have nothing to report on this yet, because everything I tried thus far does not work.

I also do not have much to report on WHS and Media Center with the 360 in the mix because I need more storage space on my WHS server to put my many GBs of files on there. I *do* plan on adding more drives and moving my files off my PC to the WHS, so I will certainly reply with that info as well. I can say this... the WHS server is awesome and worth every penny, even if only just for the piece of mind it provides pertaining to PC backups and storage redundancy. I will definitely be creating another post specifically on how I am using it in my home network of 7 PCs and other network devices.