MyMovies.xml Genre Generator for Media Browser

MyMovies.xml Genre Generator for Media Browser will help you generate symlinks for Media Browser between a flat movie collection folder and a movies by genre folder. This allows icons to be added and a virtual folder structure to be created.

Media Browser can then use this in order to view the movie collection through a virtual set of files and directories that are sorted into genres. The app will create a set of genre directories that each contain a bunch of symlinks to the real flat folder structure that live somewhere else on the hard drive.

This allows you to organize a second set of “virtual” folders (aka symlinks) for your movies by genre, while maintaining my flat directory structure somewhere else on the hard drive for metadata collection purposes by applications like media browser.

I decided to write a very simple windows application in c# to do this job. It essentially scans one flat directory structure for the mymovies.xml file, finds out what genres each movie belows to, then puts a symlink for each of the genres to that movie in the appropriate genre folder.

For example, this means that when a movie like Avatar is recognized as belonging to 4 genres (Action, Adventure, Fantasy and Sci Fi) then the application will create these genre directories (if they don’t already exist in the target location), then copy a symlink of the Avatar folder and put it into each of the genre directories.

What you end up with is a set of genre directories full of links back to the flat structure. You would then point Media Browser back to this generated folder structure instead of the flat structure so that all movies appeared in each of the applicable genres.

In addition to symlinking all of the genres the application can also allow you to specify the location of an icon pack to be used for those genres. This means that as it creates the genre directories it will check the given location for an icon that matches the name of that genre.

For example it’s creating the “Action” directory then it will check the location for a icon named “action”. If it finds one then it copies it across to the genre folder and renames it to “folder.jpg” which is the required name for Media Browser to pick it up.

The result in Windows Media Center is awesome. Media browser does have a sort by genre function but it's quite slow. This makes it native and very fast.

So now to the software. It’s pretty straight forward. First create the folder “Movie Collection by Genre” (or whatever name you like). If you’re using icons then get them ready in a folder (extract them from zip or whatever).

Then you need to fire up the “Genre Synlinker” app. Select a source (your flat “Movie Collection” directory structure) and a destination (your “Movie Collection by Genre” folder) for the symlinks. Obviously don’t set the flat structure as your destination! If you have icons then select this too.