Tags and ratings

One of the things I was looking forward to being able to do when I recently switched to Vista was giving ratings and tags to my multimedia files from within the OS. However, where I most want it, I don't seem to actually have this ability. I can do these things for pictures just fine, but where I really could use it is with video files. There does not seem to be a way to edit ratings or tags for these files, however. With .mpg, .mp4, .mov, .avi (with a very wide variety of codecs) and .flv files, and probably one or two other sorts I forgot I'd even tried, these fields don't show up in the Details pane or the Properties of the file.

How can I use these fields for what I would have thought was precisely their intended purpose?

Okay, if no-one has any ideas about the main question of this thread, how about this one: Does anyone know of good third-party software, preferably with a measure of shell integration, that can let me tag files regardless of type, then search on those tags? I don't care (unlike many people who want such software) about whether it's portable to other computers, much less a whole different OS.