Hi all,

 I'm wanting to restrict my movie collection in Media Center apart from the family movies from the kids. How can I add parent control to AVI's.

Thanks, sorry for such a basic question.

There are a few programs out there will work with media center but have never been sucessful with them. http://squirrelstash.com/

"My Movies"  has good parental control and if you compile Mediabrowser from its current svn source the new parental controls work great.(this is what i use) 

edit: Oh and what Mikinho said! I wasn't even thinking of the native mce controls

mikinho

You'll need to add metadata to each movie. You can go a couple different routes, manually getting each file from dvdxml.com or using a metadata application like Yammm, Meta Browser, ... You'll need to have each movie in it's own folder and most work by looking at the folder name. Once you have the metadata that includes the MPAA rating you can enable Parental Controls in Media Center and require a code to view movies over a specified level.

Just be aware that parental controls are not absolute.  Adding meta-data will work well with younger kids, but for an experienced windows user (think teenager), it is easily gotten around (for example, by using another program besides MC).

Mr. Headend

Just be aware that parental controls are not absolute.  Adding meta-data will work well with younger kids, but for an experienced windows user (think teenager), it is easily gotten around (for example, by using another program besides MC).

All my data is stored on a different server. The HTPC user account is a non-privileged account that does not have access to the remote share. Media Center uses alternate credentials to access it. That prevents other programs from 1- being installed; 2- being able to access the remote files. I also lock down the DvdCacheInfo folder to prevent overriding the MPAA rating. Yes there are still ways to get around it and the access code is only 4 digits so with enough time and will not too difficult to bypass. I don't think a "experience window user" will be able to get around that "easily" unless your definition of an experience window user is either a Windows developer or "hack". And if my kid can I"ll be a proud geek dad.

Edit: But I do agree that if it is vital your child not view a video it is better not to have it in Media Center at all

mikinho

All my data is stored on a different server. The HTPC user account is a non-privileged account that does not have access to the remote share. Media Center uses alternate credentials to access it. That prevents other programs from 1- being installed; 2- being able to access the remote files. I also lock down the DvdCacheInfo folder to prevent overriding the MPAA rating. Yes there are still ways to get around it and the access code is only 4 digits so with enough time and will not too difficult to bypass. I don't think a "experience window user" will be able to get around that "easily" unless your definition of an experience window user is either a Windows developer or "hack". And if my kid can I"ll be a proud geek dad.

Edit: But I do agree that if it is vital your child not view a video it is better not to have it in Media Center at all

<Mr. Headend bows to mikinho's superior configuration skills, and takes notes for his next MC configuration>

Nicely done!  I have kids, but have not put that much work into securing the content on my MC.

Hi, I'm also keen to do this - I have YAMM running and looked at the xml info and the only mention of the ratings appears to be in the "mymovies.xml" for a given AVI file. I don't use "mymovies", I only use YAMM, so my question is, can I manually set the ratings for each movie so that my kids cannot access the adult movies through media center ? And if so, which xml file do I add this rating to ?  

Thanks