QuiiQ Movies is a new Movie Archiver for Windows Vista Media Center, or as someone else said, a "nice ripoff of My Movies but in MCML".

Relax, sit back and enjoy hours of pure entertainment with your family and friends. Put in your hands the power of an interactive home cinema and theater experience. QuiiQ® MOVIES is a brand new way to archive, manage and watch your entire movies collection. Just use your remote control to transform your TV box into a glamorous cinema projector with direct links to your favorite titles, actors, directors and digital copies of your movies.

the above is part of their marketing hype

I tried it out last night (well, early this morning) after dgaust told me about it, and so far I'm not very impressed.

Interfacing isn't your forté
You can add movies using the 10' interface, but it was rather cumbersome and I didn't find any way of linking the movies I added to a file/folder on my harddrive nor did I see an option to select offline-media (ie. so it can tell you please insert DVD # 43). Actually, the more I look at the specifications for the application, it may only support DVD folder rips.

Now, it doesn't look entirely like the rest of Media Center, but at the same time it's not completely different either. It has the same 'filter' menu's on the top and a coverflow type UI for displaying your DVDs. The background is blue, but a slightly different blue than VMC in general, the background animation is also different. All in all though, it doesn't look that bad, but...

...the menu's take a while getting used to. They do not feel like the rest of VMC as it requires you to 'select' items (by clicking OK on your remote) which just doesn't feel natural coming from VMC. Anyway, here's the big problem - navigating in Media Center you would expect the 'back' button to take you back one page. For example, if you're browsing Videos using the builtin Video Gallery, pressing back will take you to the parent-folder all the way up to the main menu - this is not how it works in QuiiQ Movies. Pressing back, no matter where you are (as far as I can tell) exits the application and takes you back the the main Media Center menu. I don't know how many times I pressed 'back' by mistake whilst demoing the application, but it was more than a few.

Let's all spend another year infront of the computer ripping our 1000+ dvd collection?
It does come with a 2' UI where you can control your collection a little better, but there still doesn't seem to be a way of pointing the movie-record to a file/directory. It does however offer to copy your DVD to an 'archive', but this seems to create a DVD folder somewhere on your harddrive. Also, as far as I can tell, you cannot point it to an existing archive, rather it has to rip each DVD itself. There may very well be ways around this though as I didn't spend a huge amount of time trying it (I prefer x264/Matroska backups myself).

Don't believe the hype (or in this case, marketing screenshots)
The metadata it returns is also really bad. For example, I added I Am Legend (Bluray) to my 'collection' only to find it has _one_ actor (Will Smith), no director, no trailers and apparently no sound. I then proceeded to add I Am Legend (Combo HDDVD/DVD, DVD and the Collectors Edition DVD). These provided some more actors (strangely enough Will Smith was no longer mentioned though) but apparently they were all silent-movies still 

At no point did it grab actor photographs (or biography) like you are led to believe looking at their screenshots.

Another thing I found was, whilst it's performing a 'Web Search' for movies my entire computer grinds to a halt. I'm uncertain what's causing this, but it's obviously something to do with one of the zillion QuiiQ Movies components that was installed.

I know a lot of people are looking for a replacement for  My Movies, but this, sadly, is not it. Not even by a long-shot. I personally find the free MCOrganizer to be a lot better than QuiiQ Movies, even though it requires a third-party application to manage your collection. Of course, for the time being, My Movies is the king of Movie add-ins, unfortunately there is still no signs of the elusive MCML (Vista only) version which will feel a lot more integrated with Media Center and should perform a lot faster once you get more than a hundred or so movies in your collection.

The price is wrong, Bob (and how myDVD will compare)
I would never pay 99 Euros for it, heck, I wouldn't even pay a fifth of that. Incidentally, myDVD (name may still change due to the huge number of mediatypes it will actually support) when released will retail at around the 20 Euro mark (or $30 for our US friends) (somewhat less for existing users of myTV, and there will also be a package-deal offering both products for a lower cost), and the license model will be much more straight forward than QuiiQ Movies. For the payment of myDVD you get a full license which allows you to run 2 clients and 1 network-service. Extra clients, for those who are running several HTPCs around the house will be available for a small fee (Extenders do not require a separate licence, as long as they are running from one of the main clients).

What, myDVD you say?
Yes, you didn't honestly think I was stopping with myTV? The goal is to provide a number of great add-ins for Media Center which build on the functionality Microsoft 'forgot to include'  Due to current competing products being in development I can't give too many details at the moment, but let's just say it will offer functionality on the same level as myTV (ie automatic, fast and good looking with a huge WAF). It will be powered by the same internals as myTV, which is a SQL Express server as the local database, programmed in C# and MCML. The backend side of things are 'under wraps' due to some breakthrough thinking, but it will offer something no other (to my knowledge) movie database has offered in the past.

Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to comment (or flame me if I've gotten some information completely wrong).

Update
Ok, so I spent a little more time with this. Basically because I cannot understand how they can sell it at that price (and people are saying it's well worth the money?!@?). As it turns out, you can link your movie collection to files anywhere on your filesystem. It seems to support all types of videofiles, including DVD Folders, avi, xvid and so on - it took me a while to find though, and you have to do this (by the looks of it) from the 2' interface. MKV/x264 isn't actually listed as a supported fileformat, but it was linked anyway when I tried.

There are still a few problems with this though - firstly, your media has to be in what's called an Archive. This is configured in QuiiQ Collector and is basically a 'base' directory holding your media. You can configure several of these (look at it along the lines of a ShowFolder in myTV) - if the file you are linking (it's actually called importing) is not located within one of these Archive directories it asks you to move the file.

Doing this [through the 2' UI] for hundreds (in some cases thousands) of files isn't something I'd look forward to doing, but at least it is possible. (Ok, I know you will always have to somehow manage your collection somewhat by hand, but this is more complicated than it has to be)