TotalMedia Theater prompts you to choose a player every time you insert a DVD

Credit goes to Entertainment 2.0 listener Mike for getting us to dust off this old hack and adapting it to the latest version of TotalMedia Theater. To eliminate the prompt screen and always use Media Center to play DVDs and TotalMedia Theatre to play Blu-ray and HD DVD media, you’ll need to use the Registry editor, regedit.exe. If contemplating that raises your blood pressure, you may want to just put up with the prompt. If, however, you feel plenty comfortable mucking around in your registry, then follow these directions. But remember: you can seriously screw up your system if you don’t know what you’re doing here. Tread cautiously. As with any system update, it’s a good idea to create a restore point before making changes like this.

First, find and delete the following registry branch:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\AutoPlayHandlers\Handlers\ArcSoftTotalMediaTheatre

Then find and delete the ArcSoftTotalMediaTheatre key in the following branch:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\AutoPlayHandlers\EventHandlers\PlayDVDMovieOnArrival

After making these changes, Media Center will no longer prompt you to select a player for DVDs—it will just play them the way it always did.

If you’re using your Xbox primarily as an extender, you may just want to consider having it launch Media Center automatically each time you turn it on. The attached video shows you how to Launch Media Center from the new Xbox dashboard and how to automatically launch Windows Media Center on startup.

Instructions

Skip Through the Guide with Remote Shortcuts

Skip forward and backward by three or twelve hours at a time in Media Center’s guide by pressing the Fast Forward and Rewind or Skip and Replay buttons on your remote, respectively.

Show a Specific Network’s Programming Lineup

To see all the shows a specific network has scheduled for the coming days, use the navigation arrows on your remote to move to the left and select a specific network.

Filtering the Guide

Using navigation arrows on your remote control to move to the left in the guide to the Categories, where you can choose any category and filter your provider’s content.

Using these tips together, you’ll find that your use of Media Center’s guide will be more effective and efficient.

Instructions

Select Media Only in the Tasks strip

Click Yes to confirm the change

At this point, Media Center will switch to full screen if it wasn’t already, and a lock icon in the upper-right corner will indicate that it’s in Media Only mode.

To exit Media Only mode, select Exit Media Only in the Tasks strip. Note that Media Only mode doesn’t prevent keyboard users from accessing the start menu or task switching to another running program—it just removes the window control buttons from interface, which is most useful for touchscreen applications.

Instructions

Select Settings under Tasks

Select TV

Select Recorder

Select Recorder Storage

Set the TV Recordings Drive. Under Record on drive, use the + and - buttons to flip through the available drives and choose your new drive. You can select any internal or external drive, but not mapped network volumes.

Set the Maximum TV Limit. If you’re dedicating the new drive to Recorded TV storage, then use the + button next to the storage limit to select the highest setting. The graph at the bottom of the screen will show how many hours of standard and high definition television you can store on the new drive.

Save your changes. That’s it! Windows automatically adds the new drive to your Recorded TV library, and all new shows will be recorded on it. All of your old shows will still appear in your Recorded TV library.

Source: Barnesian

Many Windows Media Center users have complained that Microsoft’s time service against which Windows’ time gets synchronized is unreliable. Whether the time itself is accurate or not, one thing is certain—syncing against the default service fails a lot! You can improve the reliability of your time service updates by changing to one of a number of different services offered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Instructions

Open the Date and Time control panel and select the Internet Time tab. One quick way to get to this is to click the clock in the notification area, and then click the Change date and time settings link.

Click Change Settings to open the Internet Time Settings window. Provide your administrator credentials, if prompted.

Open the Server list and select a NIST time server. If Synchronize with an Internet time server is not already selected, click it now.

Click Update Now. Wait for a response from the service.

Click OK to close any open windows.

It’s worth noting that changing the service may not be enough to fix your problems. Windows doesn’t update the time often enough to keep some PCs on schedule. If your PC’s clock runs a little fast or slow, you may also need to explore creating a scheduled task on your computer to trigger the synchronization more frequently. Here’s a tutorial we found on how to make Windows 7 synchronize time more frequently.

In this example, we’ll disable the Home Server menu that Media Center Connector adds to the Start menu. It’s not that we don’t want access to the Home Server plug-ins—but it may not be desirable for them to be so prominently displayed in the Start menu for your household or sitter to fiddle with.

Instructions

Select Extras Library in the Extras strip

Select Manage Extras

Navigate to the top of the Extras Library screen and select Manage Extras.

Select Start Menu

Disable Start Menu strips

• Clear the Home Server checkbox (or any other add-in’s checkbox) to exclude from the Start menu.
• When finished, select Save.
• Press Back to return to the Extras Library.

At this point, the Home Server strip is gone from your Start menu. But what if you want easy access to the add-in even though you don’t want the strip in the Start menu? You can add a tile to your Extras strip:

Add extras to the Start Menu

• Navigate to the desired add-in in your Extra Library and press Info or More.
• Select Add to Start Menu.

That’s it! When you return to your Start menu, the Extras strip will include a tile for the add-in. (In this example, we added a TV Archive tile.)

You may notice that after installing updates for your add-ins, you’ll need to go through these steps again, but this tip should help to keep your Media Center’s Start menu nice and tidy.

Instructions

Select Settings under Tasks

Select DVD

Select Remote Control Options

Set your preferred button behaviors

• Under When I press Skip and Replay, select Skip forward and backward.
• Under When I press Channel Up and Channel Down, select Skip chapters.
• Finally, select Save.

If you change your remote options as above, your skip forward and back buttons will now function for DVD playback as they do for TV viewing—as 30 second skip and instant replay. To jump between chapters, use your Channel Up and Down buttons now. If only we could get Total Media Theater on board….

Guide Colors:

• Purple – Movies
• Green – Sports
• Light Blue – Kids & Family
• Orange – Specials
• Yellow – News

Instructions

First select Settings under Tasks

Select TV in the Settings menu

Select Guide

Select Guide Page Options

Check Apply colored backgrounds to shows, based on their category

Now look at your guide!

Cheap HTPC is a Champ

Two weeks ago I decided to create a HTPC on the cheap. The goal was simple build a powerful HTPC for under $500. I put together full list of parts that you can read about in HTPC on the Cheap Part 1. The main points are 2 TV tuners, large hard drive, smoking fast AMD Athlon II X3 processor, and a motherboard with a Radeon 4250 built in. This machine should be able to play 1080p content, Netflix HD, Amazon VOD, Hulu, and just about anything else you would want from a HTPC. I have already had an Acer Aspire Revo machine as my main HTPC for just about a year now and I even created RevoHTPC.com to showcase how I completely configured it, but after just 2 weeks with this new HTPC I am basically blown away. Here is a full breakdown of everything I have gone through.

Setup

Building a computer can be a challenge if it is your first time. Luckily this was my third time putting together a computer, and all of the parts just fell into place. One issue I did have was with the power supply inside the case. It only had 1 Sata power connection, so I did have to run to my local Fry’s electronics to grab the 4pin to Sata power adapters which added an additional $6 to the configuration. If you are only going to be using 1 drive then you would be fine, however I have 1 drive as the main OS drive (80GB) and 2 1TB drives. One drive is dedicated to recorded television shows, and the other is all my music and video files until I have a home server up and running again (waiting for Vail to officially release). Loading up Windows 7 was easy and painless as usual, and I found an amazing tool online that allowed me to transfer my setting from my Revo to this new machine, which is mcBackup. This tool simply allows you to save your configuration and then reimport it. There are more features to mcBackup such as automatic backups every night, but I just uninstalled it when I was done. After setting up all of my tuners inside of Media Center I went ahead and installed Hulu Desktop and the Media Center Integrator. I also installed the Revision3 media center plugin, Media Browser, Netflix, and Internet TV.

Inside of the Bios I adjusted the UMA buffer for video to 512MB. By default this is set to auto, however we really want 512MB of RAM dedicated to the Radeon 4250 since we are using this as a main HTPC, and not a normal computer. I only ran into one little issue, which was that I couldn’t get 5.1 audio to pass through the HDMI. The Biostar A880G+ said right on the box that is supported 6 channel audio so I was extremely confused after installing the driver from the included CD and the official AMD HDMI audio driver. No matter what I did it just wouldn’t work. I talked to Josh about the issue and he pointed me over to the Realtek website where I found the ATI HDMI Audio Device R2.55. After uninstalling all of the old drivers and installing R2.55 Windows still displayed 2 channels for audio. Then I went into media center and configured the speakers and it pushed out 5.1 just fine when watching movies or television. I did attempt 5.1 with VLC, but it still only output 2.0 audio, which is a let down. I am thinking that the problem most likely has to do with my sound bar that I am using, Sony HT-CT100, which is a 3.1 system that accepts up to 7.1 audio. Perhaps when I move and get a full receiver and surround sound system I can test it out again, but that will not be for a while.

Besides these few tweaks everything fits into the case that I purchased. And it is sitting happily in my entertainment center. If you are just getting started on HTPCs check out the Beginner’s Guide to HTPCs over at the missing remote.

Normal Usage

I am inside of Windows Media Center about 99% of the time when using my HTPC, which means it needs to be snappy, responsive, and just work. I must say with this processor WMC is super fast, the menus fly, the guide works splendidly, and the movie gallery is smooth. I mean this thing is really fast and really makes you love the media center user interface. Inside of the bios there is a setting to automatically adjust the fan based on the CPU temperature and turning this on made the machine completely silent. If the CPU gets too warm 37C or higher then the fan ramps up and you can hear a quiet hum. I have only ever had this happen once when I closed the front door on my entertainment console. It was back down to normal temperature in a few minutes. When recording a show and watching a 1080p movie the core CPU temperature was only 33C.

Now as far as CPU usage it is really amazing how little is being used and how fast this machine is. My standard test was recording an HD show and watching a1080p movie CPU usage hovered at 2-8%, which is absolutely crazy. Pulling up Netflix and watching HD content only tagged the CPU at 30%. The real big test however is to see if this machine can handle a lot is to have an extender and watch television on both of them at one time. I hooked up my Xbox 360 and the first thing that I noticed is that it worked really great and was fast and responsive. CPU usage was alright averaging around 40-50%. It should be said that the extender used up an additional 200MB of RAM. It is looking like the 4GB of RAM is really helping out and is recommended. I tried to play all sorts of content to really see if I could bring down this machine, and it was basically impossible.

Playback

Basic playback of television was extremely smooth and never had any issues at all. Even if I brought up the mini guide on top of live television there was no stutter at all. Playing movies and videos was flawless as well, there is absolutely nothing to complain about here. There was nothing I could throw at this machine that it couldn’t play. Even 1080p movies inside of VLC played back great. The Radeon 4250 pairs with Athlon II X3 is just a great combination.

Streaming Services

Netflix

I decided to renew my subscription to Netflix just for 1 month to test out this new build. One big problem with my Acer Aspire Revo was that it could not handle Netflix HD. Since Silverlight is not yet GPU accelerated it really took down the CPU and would just choke. This wasn’t the reason I left Netflix, it was mostly because I ran out of interesting shows and movies to watch and there was no reason to keep paying $8 a month. However, now that I have been gone for a while from Netflix the circumstance has changed and there are a lot of new shows and movies, and Netflix HD streams absolutely perfect on this machine. Not only does it stream perfect, the user interface inside of WMC is really fast and responsive. It is a pleasure to flip through and see what I haven’t watched yet and just add it to my queue.

Internet TV

Internet TV is a feature inside of WMC that offers a lot of content from CBS and other sources. The steam is usually just standard definition video with some commercials and is all Flash based. Everything was pretty flawless as well.

Hulu

Good old Hulu Desktop has been my best friend on the Revo ever since Flash 10.1 came out. Hulu has a huge collection of television shows for free. I am not a huge fan of the entire user interface, however it was very snappy and High Quality streamed perfect.

Power Consumption

One question a lot of people asked me when I put up the first article was how much more power this new machine was going to consume. So I went out and purchased a Kill a Watt so I could monitor power usage in different circumstances. The standard use case would be that the HTPC sits idle, then you have just watching television, and then recording a television show and watching 1080p content. I figured that for around 17 hours a day the HTPC sits idle, 4 hours of normal usage, and 3 hours of heavy usage. Of course this can vary every day, but I figure this is a good estimate.  I decided to make a super crazy Excel spreadsheet to measure everything I possibly could on both my Revo and this machine and I was really surprised by the results. The Revo I had could never go above 60W, but I also had a whole bunch of other attachments including 2 hard drives and a USB hub. The new HTPC has a 420W power supply, and the CPU itself is 90W so I knew there was going to be a difference.

There are a lot of different things that I measure, but the most important are the Watts (current power being used) and KWH (Kilowatt Hour, which is how much power the machine uses after 1 hour). Most power providers simply charge you a standard rate for each Kilowatt you use. I have APS here in Arizona, and I am on an odd power plan where it cost 16 cents per kilowatt (9am-9pm weekdays) and then 5 cents all other times. If you do the calculations it looks like the Acer Aspire Revo would cost me around $35.50 for a full year while the new HTPC would cost me around $53.25. I am completely comfortable paying just $17-$18 more a year to have this HTPC. If you want a full breakdown you can download the full Excel spreadsheet here.

Conclusion

Overall I am extremely happy with this new HTPC. Everything just works and works very well. It is almost night and day from the Revo. I was always happy with my Acer Aspire Revo, however I am thrilled about this new setup and I don’t think I can go back. If anyone has any more questions please feel to leave comments and I will respond.

So here is my goal:

The first things to do is to pick out the processor and motherboard. I looked around at all of the processors that AMD offers and it was a tough decision with prices of dual and triple cores ranging between $57 and $80. The Athlon II X2 240 (on Amazon) offers a 2.8GHz dual core processor and only pulls in 65W for $58, while the Athlon II X3 450 (on Amazon)is a 3.2GHz triple core processors but pulls in 95W of power. This was an extremely tough decision as I am on a tight budget, but the decision was easy once I found the motherboard, which was to go with the Athlon II X3.

The motherboard needed to support the AM3 chipset of the Athlon II chips and had to have the Radeon HD 4250 onboard. Since I want to build a small HTPC I found the BIOSTAR A880G+ (on Amazon), which features the 4250, has HDMI out, a PCI Express 2.0 x16, 2 PCI Slots, and 4 Sata ports. This little beauty was only $55, and had a $10 mail in rebate. To top it off if you bundled it with the Athlon II X3 you saved an additional $15, which brought the total of motherboard and processor to $110, which is a steal!

Since I found myself such a great deal on the motherboard and processor I decided to splurge just a little bit and get 4GB of DDR3 RAM. The choice was easy as G.SKILL has been my preferred memory of choice for some time, their
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 for only $49 will compliment the motherboard nicely.

Finding a nice computer case on a budget that has a nice design is extremely difficult to do. Finding a small form factor case adds complexity to this process as most cases are cheaply made, or just don’t look attractive. I took a long time to look through all of the MicroATX cases that Newegg had to offer, and I landed on a case by APEVIA. It features a 420W power supply, four hard drive bays, and a front LCD temperature display which is a nice touch. This little guy looked like it would look nice sitting under my television and was only $80, plus it had a $10 mail in rebate bringing it down to $70.

Let’s get the software out of the way right away, we are going to be using
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium. It has the main feature we’re looking for: Windows 7 Media Center. We need an operating system, so there is no way to get around it. This will add on $100 to the base price of your machine.

For tuners I really wanted to put an internal card, however most of the dual tuner cards are PCIe x1, however the motherboad only supports x16. You could go with 2 PCI cards which would be just fine as well, however to make everything simple I would recommend picking up a
SiliconDust HDHomeRun Network-based Dual (on Amazon). This is a network tuner, and Josh could not recommend it enough. It was on sale for $90.

You can get absolutely crazy with hard drives if you would like. I would recommend a nice SSD for your main drive, and a larger data drive, but with only $80 left in the budget I had to keep it simple. I was in luck today as I found a nice
SAMSUNG Spinpoint 1TB (on Amazon) on sale for $55. With $25 under budget you could stop here and checkout, or maybe you want to simplify your life with a nice
Media Center Remote (on Amazon) for $23. I would obviously recommend a nice Harmony remote, but that is not in the budget. If you don’t need a remote then you could always get a dedicated hard drive for Windows so the 1TB drive is dedicated to Recorded TV.

Now I maxed out the $500 limit here with everything I thought you might need, however this HTPC can be done for less. Let me break down some reductions:
1.) PCIe Dual Tuner (-$20)
2.) Cheaper Case (-$20 to $40)
3.) 2GB RAM instead of 4GB (-$20)
4.) No Media Center Remote (-$20)
5.) Smaller Hard Drive? (-$20)

With these you could easily bring it below $400, even less if you shopped around for deals on the Athlon II X2 processor. I went a bit overboard, but I think this is a solid configuration.

The question you have now is how does it perform? You will find out in Part 2, I still have to build it! I just received the parts in the mail today, so check out this sweet unboxing video below!

Update 1:
Adding video/picture blog:

Construction Gallery:
[nggallery id=3]

First Bootup:

Bios sneak peak:

Quick analysis + hard drive noise:

Windows Experience Index:

System properties:

Check out the full review here in Part 2.

Josh and I are joined once again but guest James Montemagno.  While the shows are a bit longer, having another perspective on things is enjoyable and we hope James has time to keep coming back.

Check below for all the show links and remember to get your emails and voicemails in for next week’s show!  We always enjoy reading feedback and questions from listeners so keep them coming.

Click here to download this week’s episode!

Show Links:

• Autoruns
• Commercial Skipping Article
• My Movies Android
• mcShoutcast
• Microsoft Streaming TV Rumor
• Podcasts in Media Center

Be sure and send us your emails and voicemail! (1-877-856-4933)

	Entertainment 2.0 Subscriptions

Once you have your Windows Media Center properly setup to record TV you’ll need two additional pieces of software. One, DvrmsToolbox, is free, the other, Show Analyzer, is not. Show Analyzer will only set you back $29.98. A fair price to pay considering you won’t need to watch commercials anymore!

Summary

First you’re going to install Show Analyzer. This software scans recorded TV shows for commercials. It then saves the location of the commercials in a file. Then you will install DvrmsToolbox (DTB), and the DTB Media Center add-in. After being configured these two make the rest of the commercial skipping mgaic happen. When you start watching a recorded TV show the add-in will look to see if Show Analyzer has already scanned it for commercials. If it hasn’t, it will ask you if you would like it to. If it has, then the show will continue to play as normal, except that when you get to the beginning of a commercial break the add-in will automatically jump to the end of the break! You don’t need to hit fast-forward. You don’t even need to pick up the remote. The other really nice feature of the system being configured this way is that even if the commercial detection wasn’t perfect, you can still fast-forward, or rewind, to compensate. Follow the steps below to configure your system accordingly.

Step 1: Purchase and install Show Analyzer

Head on over to Dragon Global and purchase a copy of Show Analyzer. Once you have it, run the very simple setup utility, and for good measure, reboot your machine. The way that you will configure everything to work doesn’t require you to do any more configuration of Show Analyzer.

Step 2 : Download DvrmsToolbox and the Media Center Add-In

Click to Zoom

Go to the downloads section for DvrmsToolbox at Babgvant.com and download the item called DVRMSToolbox. The current version as of this writing is 1.2.2.2. You also need to download DTBAddin. The current version is 1.0.0.6. Install the main DvrmsToolbox first. When you get to the setup screen for Optional Components you should uncheck “Download/Install ShowAnalyzer” as you will have already installed it. Make sure to leave “Run the DTB File Watcher as a service” checked.

Once DTB is installed, you need to install the DTB Addin. The zip file contains multiple install files. There is one for 32 bit versions of Windows 7, and one for 64 bit version. If you’re not sure which version you have go to the control panel, then System and Security, then System. Under System type it will say either 32-bit or 64-bit. If you have 32-bit run W7DTBAddinSetupX86.msi, if you have 64-bit run W7DTBAddinSetupX64.msi. After installation is complete, restart your computer.

Step 3 : Configure DvrmsToolbox

Click to Zoom

DTB does a lot more than just skip commercials, so the settings application can be a little daunting. To configure DTB launch DVRMStoMPEGSettings from the DVRMSToolbox group in the Start menu. The first screen, DVRMSToolbox, only has a couple of options, you’ll want to leave the default settings.

• Default Priority – Below Normal
• Preferred Analyzer – Automatic

Click to Zoom

On the second tab, File Watcher, there are a lot of options, but you only need to verify a few of them.

• Watched Directories – Just ensure that this is where your recorded tv .wtv files are. By default they are stored in C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV. I’ve moved mine to D:\Recordd TV\ so it is modified in my screenshot.
• Watched Ext – Ensure that .wtv is in the list. It should be a default though.
• Video Types – Ensure that this list also contains .wtv
• Process Files Missing Artifacts – If you leave this checked it will automatically begin processing the files you already have recorded. If you have a lot of shows, this could take a VERY LONG time.

Click to Zoom

On the third tab, MC Addin, you will find the settings for Media Center Add-in. This is the piece that controls how to actually skip past the commercials when you’re watching tv.

• Skip Commercials – If you don’t have this checked, it wont’s skip the commercials
• Handle Keys – I would recommend unchecking this. If you leave it checked then the add-in will cause Media Center to do other things when buttons are pressed on the remote while watching tv. If you’re the only one using the Media Center then feel free to play around with this, but if you have other family members using it also you probably won’t want to give them a 45 minute lecture explaining to them all the things that are different.

There are a lot of other options, but you can just leave them as default, or as I’ve demonstrated in the screenshot.

Click to Zoom

The fourth tab, Commercial Skip, also has a couple of important settings. All of the settings at the top can be left alone, especially if you unchcked the Handle Keys option on the previous tab.

• Auto Skip – Make sure this is checked. It will then cause it to automatically skip past commercials when they are found
• Suppress Skip Dialog – Check this box. If this is not checked you might see annoying pop-up boxes while watching tv that is still scanning for commercials.
• Suppress Not Found – Leave this unchecked. If you go to watch something that hasn’t been scanned for commercials it will prompt you with a simple Yes or No dialog asking if you would like to begin scanning that show.

Click to Zoom

The last tab that should be looked at for commercial skipping is the Processing tab.There are only two settings to verify though:

• Delay Processing : FindCommercials
• Detection Profile : Find Commercials in DVR-MS

Conclusion

It may seem like a lot, but in the end it will be worth it. If there’s anything that we’ve missed, or you still have other questions, please leave a comment on the post and we’ll update the post.

FAQ

Q – Can copy-protected recordings be scanned for commercials?

A – No. ShowAnalyzer would need to purchase a PlayReady license from Microsoft to be able to scan copy-protected content. To learn more about copy-protection, check out this article we wrote.

Media Browser

Media Browser parental controls are relatively straight forward.  While there are two methods for achieving what you want.  Here we’ll cover the one that is easiest and allows you to maintain your current library structure if you’re already setup.

Head right on in to your Media Browser Configurator.  You’ll need to click the “Advanced” section in order for the parental control tab to appear:

Click over to your parental control tab.  This is where the magic happens.  Checking the ticbox that enables parental control will open up the other options:

The most important thing here is that you need to have proper metadata attached to your files.  No matter what application you use to get this information, rating info is what is going to be used.  Media Browser looks to the XML file to determine whether or not to apply the parental locks, so you’ll want it to be accurate.  Luckily there’s a check box that allows you to block unrated content so that can come in handy.  Below I’ve highlighted the recommended settings which will allow you as an adult to view all of your content, but should keep your younger family members from accessing the content you don’t want them to:

You’ll notice above that Media Browser also gives you the opportunity to lock entire collections using a rating.  While this is how I initially setup our collection, I decided against it as I was constantly having to enter the PIN every time I wanted to browse through the collection.  It’s much easier to simply set a global rating and allow the application to take it from there.

Below you’ll see how Media Browser changes once parental controls are active.  Each piece of content that is above the set rating (or unrated depending on settings) will show a small “lock” icon on the cover.  With the controls turned on, you’re able to enter the info screen for each item but once you hit play, you’ll be asked for the PIN number before playback will begin:

That’s it!  Setup is a breeze and you now know that little ones won’t be viewing content that you deem inappropriate.  While Media Browser doesn’t have the fine control for TV that Media Center itself does, it’s a more than adequate system that should handle all of your needs.

My Movies

(Note:  I installed My Movies specifically for this article.  As such, the library is not complete and full metadata has not been downloaded.  There is, however, enough data to follow along.)

While My Movies has a different procedure for locking down your more mature content, the concept is basically the same.  Enable controls, set a PIN and pick a rating.  As with Media Browser, you’ll want to ensure you have proper metadata, or at a minimum, give a rating to each piece of content:

After installing My Movies, creating your library and checking your metadata, you’ll want to click the “Tools” menu to access the options screen:

Once there, click “Parental Controls” and turn them on by clicking “Enable Parental Controls”.  Here you’ll be asked to enter a PIN.  Though My Movies doesn’t tell you how many digits to enter, I used four and it worked perfectly.  You’ll also be asked to confirm the PIN:

Once parental controls are enabled and your PIN is entered, you’ll be presented with the settings screen.  As with other applications, you can set rating levels for movies and TV respectively.  You also have the option of including adult titles as well as blocking unrated titles.  Again, this is good in case your metadata isn’t complete:

With your settings applied, you’re done.  Save and exit.

To check things, head into Media Center and find your My Movies tile.  One thing the application does differently is block the viewing of anything that is above your set rating unless you enter your PIN.  While this does provide total protection, I find that this could become an annoyance:

Simply hit that “parental unlock” button up top.  You’ll be asked for you PIN and once entered, you full collection will become visible:

At this point you’re set.  You can now enjoy your movie collection through a great interface without worry that your kids will find something you don’t want them viewing.

Conclusion

You’re certainly not going to pick a catalog application based on parental controls.  That said, I personally like Media Browser’s implementation a bit better.  There are multiple options as to how to handle parental controls and implementing them doesn’t hide your entire collection; it just prevents playback.  That means you don’t have to enter a code just to browse.  While some might like that, it seems cumbersome to me.  That said, while I am a Media Browser fan, the differences shouldn’t take away from My Movies.  The collection manager is superb and the application looks phenomenal in Media Center.  It’s simply a matter of personal preference.

While other factors will decide which media plugin you use, it’s good to know that the developers (and in some cases, the community behind them) have taken parental control into consideration and provided elegant, easy to use solutions for parents interested in keeping nightmares at bay.