Hands On: Shrink video files, plus how Eee is used

In this column, we'll address some comments received following our coverage of the Asus Eee PC ultraportable laptop, and look at a workflow for archiving Windows Media Center Edition TV recordings.

Nip and tuck
Nothing consumes hard disk space like TV recordings. Digital video is much larger than photo or music files at the best of times, but with most entertainment PCs recording raw transport streams as broadcast, they’re often much heftier than the optimised files found on downloads and discs.

Throw in some padding to ensure the beginning and end of your favourite shows aren’t missed and files become even bigger. So if your PC is recording shows and you prefer to archive rather than delete them, you’ll almost certainly be either running low on space, or perhaps already have several disks full of material.

Luckily there are plenty of utilities designed to chop and squeeze your precious recordings. Following months of tweaking and experimenting though, we’d like to share the workflow that has proven most effective for our own Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) system.

Chop chop
The obvious way to deal with ever-growing media collections is to recompress the files. But while recompression is part of our workflow, it’s worth first investing some time in editing, as this can result in some large savings with no loss in quality.

Take an average one-hour TV show with, say, five minutes of padding at either side; this results in a 70-minute file. To accommodate trailers, station idents and continuity announcements, the hour-long show will rarely last longer than 58 minutes, so your recording already has at least 12 minutes of wastage.

If the show was broadcast on a commercial UK channel, you could expect at least three ad breaks, lasting around 10 minutes in total – this figure can vary, but your hour-long show could now be fast approaching 45 minutes of actual material, which is 25 minutes less than what you’ve recorded. There’s potentially a saving of over one-third there after editing.

Half-hour shows result in even bigger differences. You could start with a 40-minute file thanks to padding, but have only around 28 minutes of actual show on a non-commercial channel, or as little as 20 minutes on a channel with adverts.

The material could typically represent half of what you originally recorded, so it’s clear editing can make significant savings in storage without resorting to time-consuming and potentially damaging recompression. So what’s the best tool for the job?

Editing MCE recordings
Microsoft’s DVR-MS format used for storing TV recordings on MCE systems may feature fairly standard video codecs (such as MPEG2 for UK TV), but proves surprisingly incompatible with popular editing programs. Even Microsoft’s own Windows Movie Maker can be tripped up. The version that comes with XP doesn’t work, while Vista’s may claim compatibility but we’ve never had much luck with it.

Luckily there’s a free utility that does the job quickly. Go to http://thegreenbutton.com/files and download Alex Seigler’s DVR-Edit. This is a standalone utility that operates outside the MCE interface and lets you crop recordings and cut adverts.

Once you’ve opened a file, DVR-Edit will start playing it and allow you to mark in and out points by clicking on the square bracket icons. The idea is to surround the parts you want to keep with the brackets, so in written terms you would have something like this: [first half of show] ad break [second half]. This would then crop the beginning and end of the file along with removing the segment in the middle.

It’s quick and easy to do this by dragging the slider to a rough position with the mouse, then using the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge back and forth before marking the in and out points.