Media management question

Hi everyone,
This past weekend I installed the 7.04 version of LMCE. After a few growing pains with the nvidia drivers and xorg.conf, things are running well now. My only issue is managing my media (aka, dealing with the mySQL database). Non of the media I had put into the media directories (public or private) was showing up in the lists. Then I ran /usr/pluto/bin/Updatemedia, and things went south.
Now all the .avi files from the av wizard show up in my videos. I had a DVD in the drive with video clips on it, and now all the stuff from the DVD shows in the media list, even when DVD is no longer in the drive.
Also, the files in /home/user_1 still don't show in the media list. I had to be root to access the user_1 directory to copy things into it. Should I change the ownership/permissions on it?
I've played around with the LMCE admin browse media and media sync pages, but I didn't have any luck getting them to do anything. Is there a better interface for dealing with the media database?