how to import movies from external hd to windows media centre

Question

I am trying to configure my Windows Media Center (Windows 7 Ultimate). I selected folder with my movies and added it to the library, but when I went to the movies library, it says "There are no items in this library yet - Windows Media Center is searching for media files in the background...". I have all necessary codecs installed, Windows Media Player opens those movies correctly. When I right click on the file -> Open with -> Windows Media Center it also plays them without any problem. Any ideas why they don't appear in the libraries?

Edit: Movies are coded with divx and xvid codecs and they have ".avi" extension. Windows doesn't have problems playing them. I told Media Center where are the files. I even pointed it to look in a folder with only one .avi file and still it couldn't find anything there. I have given it quiet a lot of time, I'll leave it open for a few hours but I don't think it will make any difference. Especially that searching in the directory with only one file shouldn't take more than a few seconds. When I add a folder with a lot of movies, I get a dialog box "You can wait while media is added or select OK to continue using Windows Media Center.". At the end it says it added about 90 movies, but when I go to the libraries, it's still empty.

Answer 1

I would recommend setting up media browser plugin. Its a media library plugin that looks a lot slicker and does a ton more with your files for you (amusing your files are named the same as they're named on IMDB).

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

I've never tried to load a lib from an external HDD but i assume it would work fine since your able to add network folders as well.

It will automatically reach out to IMDB and grab movie posters, ratings, synopsis, ext for you and allows you to sort by a ton of different categories. You can play iso's through it if you have daemon tools installed. You can even trans-code to an xbox with additional software.