After visting a mate and seeing how well he set up Media Center with metadata, I decided to look into it myself.
The process is to basically get an application to look through your TV / Movie folders and grab all the pertinent information about the show, the actors, ratings, description of episodes, artwork (poster etc), and so on. Once the application has set up your folders with the extra info (metadata) then Media Center can look at it and display it nicely for you.
There is a popular tool to do this called MetaBrowser, which now requires registration and a fee to use. The old version works, but is far from user friendly. But, in looking around to find instructions on setting up metabrowser, I came across Media Center Master.
So far it looks promising. Looks like it does a decent job, and even has facility to download shows / keep them up to date via torrents. Im yet to test out Media Center to see the final result.
If you are interested, grab version 1.25 as its completely free and unlimited. The later versions have a free/paid option with a number of restrictions on the free one of course.
Worth a look anyway 🙂