Stark Covers

Stark Covers is a small tool to add some customization to your movie covers/posters. You can get it from here. With this software you can add a polish design to your movie, TV covers or even for CD covers (only with the media browser phoenix or above version). The only con I see is you have to run it every time we add a new movie or a TV show. The software uses a previous grabbed folder.jpg and convert it to folder.png. And the folder.jpg will rename to bkfolder.jpg.

Star Covers UI

Here you can see stark covers added to the DVDs and Blue-Ray movies

Stark Covers added to a TV show

Stark Covers added to the Music Files

Media Browser - Part 3 - Adding a Custom Background and an Icon

It is very easy to change the background and the icon of media browser. So find a good background image which is suitable for you and put it in the following folder. The image could be a .jpg or .png. But the name must be as follows: backdrop.jpg or backdrop.png 

C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\StartupFolder

 You can get several nice looking background images from here.

To change the icon you just have to replace the Application.png and ApplicationInactive.png images found in C:\Program Files\MediaBrowser\MediaBrowser 

You can get an icon from here.

Media Browser - Part 2 - Themes

After you completed the initial configurations you can do further enhancements by going to the MB’s configuration setup.  To go there click the wrench button on the right-bottom on the media browser home screen. There you’ll find several themes default, diamond, harmony, vanilla etc. Of course you won’t see all of I’ve mentioned unless you add the plugins I cited in my previous post. Here are some of the screenshots of available themes for media browser.

Default Theme

Diamond Theme

Harmony Theme

Vanilla Theme

Media Browser for Windows Media Center - Part 1

Media Browser is a free plugin which enhances the media center experience. It simply the best tool to present the media such as movies, musical concerts and TV shows in windows media center. It also has an elegant and easy looking interface. If someone is using windows 7 media center to watch movies and TV shows, this is the best tool to get the maximum experience from a media center. The software adds features such as automatic metadata retrieval, ability to add trailers, podcast/vodcast via RSS and lots of other features. And it also supports the external players. You can download it by clicking here.

When you installed media browser for the first time it is necessary to configure it.

One of the coolest things this tool has is ability to create virtual folders. So if you have movies stored on multiple locations of your computer of server you can put all of them in a single virtual folder. Another interest thing is it allows using a custom icon for those virtual folders.

We can add custom plugins and themes to media browser by simply clicking “add.” There are several other plugins you can add which doesn’t come with the media browser. In order to add a custom plugin you have to add the source which contains the plugin or theme. Therefore, click add-->file-->sources-->add and paste the URL and close it. Here I have pointed out some of the sources to the plugins.

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/plugins/plugin_info.xml

http://www.ebrsoft.com/software/mb//plugins/plugin_info.xml

http://www.throgosoft.com/plugins/plugin_info.xml

http://www.creaigthomas.co.za/plugins/plugin_info.xml

Apart from them, there are more options to configure. However, after finishing this step, you can start media center and start media browser. Then it asks to go through a quick setup.

Add Metadata to Movies using MetaBrowser

Metabrowser is a great free tool to add metadata such as covers, backdrops, actors/actresses and many other information. If you are using Windows Media Center with or without the mediabrowser plugin and have a huge library of movies, this tool is a must. The tool grabs metadata from TMDB. It also can organize your movie database into folders. If you add the release year of the movie within brackets at the end of the filename [e.g name (2010)], matabrowser will easily grab information for you.
Click here to download this tool.

How to Create a Folder named CON, PRN, NUL

Try to create a folder with one of the following name.

CON, AUX, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, PRN, NUL

You can't huh...

But there is a way to do that. Here is how you can do that.

Press WindowsKey+R to open the Run dialog box and type CMD and hit OK to get into Command Prompt.

Then type md\\.\c:\con and hit enter. You can type any path instead of C:\ of your choice.So now you can use this folder as a regular folder. 

How to change the Windows 7 Library Icon

As the first step navigate to the following path whereas USERNAME is the name of your user account of your PC.

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries