Hands on: Archive Media Center recordings

One of the beauties of using a PC as a personal video recorder is the ability to equip it with as much storage as you’d like.

But even with the largest hard disks on the market, the seasoned TV addict will still run out of space at some point.

And this brings us to another advantage of a media PC: the possibility of editing or recompressing recordings to save space.

In this month’s Hardware column, we’ll look into a number of options available for Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) PC users. The main challenge for editing and compressing MCE recordings is dealing with the proprietary ‘dvr-ms’ file format, which Microsoft developed specifically for MCE.

Since dvr-ms uses the standard MPEG 2 format under the hood for storing compressed video and audio, you may think Microsoft was just being difficult when it decided to deliver it in a proprietary format. But it was necessary to support features such as pausing or skipping through recordings while they were still being recorded, not to mention containing details about the show and channel. So MCE owners simply have to learn to work with the dvr-ms format.

Microsoft doesn’t include any means by which to edit or recompress TV recordings as standard with MCE. There is an option for OEMs to provide pre-built MCE systems with DVD authoring facilities, but with no editing facilities or any real storage savings, it’s really only meant as a way to externally archive or play MCE recordings on standard consumer DVD players.

So, it’s over to third parties and in the true spirit of enthusiasts, many of the best solutions are available free of charge. Some first try to strip the MPEG 2 data from the file, widening editing and compression options. Others first convert and compress it to formats such as Microsoft’s own WMV, allowing more editing options. Here’s a small selection, some of which can even be operated by remote control from the comfort of your sofa.

DVR 2 WMV
The appropriately titled DVR 2 WMV is one of the most popular tools for converting MCE recordings into a more manageable format. Written by Alex Seigler, José Peña, James Edelen and Jeff Griffin, DVR 2 WMV simply takes dvr-ms recordings and compresses them into Microsoft’s own Windows Media Video, WMV format. You can download it from http://thegreenbutton.com/files.

DVR 2 WMV offers the choice of operation from a standalone program window or from MCE’s TV user interface. Both share the same options, which must be configured before going any further. Most crucially you’ll need to select a preferred decoder under the Options menu. This will normally be the one installed on your system to play DVDs and other MPEG 2 files, such as Cyberlink’s PowerDVD.

After this you can choose between constant and variable bit rates before setting it loose on a recording. Like all video transcoders, the conversion process can take several hours and will consume any spare processing power, so don’t be alarmed if you measure your CPU usage in the high 90s.

On the upside, DVR 2 WMV is a pretty foolproof way of converting recordings to the WMV format. On the downside the resulting files may not always be that much smaller than their originals. Many have also reported problems, depending on the preferred decoder.