Here is a small tip to all of you that have DVD movies on your hard drives, like me. I have copied most of our kids DVD’s to the hard drives so there is no need to change DVD every fifth minute and as all of you with kids know - they are not that gentle to the DVD discs nor the cradle of the player.
Windows Vista Media Center does not initially allow you to watch ripped DVD movies using the Video Library, it only shows an empty VIDEO_TS folder. What you have to do is enable the DVD Gallery in Media Center, this is done through a small registry tweak.
Change the data of the ShowGallery value of the following key from Play to Gallery and you will have the DVD Library enabled instead of the Play DVD option.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings
Now you can add the folders containg the copied DVD discs to the gallery and have fast access to your DVD movies.
Disclaimer: All changes to the Windows Vista registry is done at your own risk.