Hands on: Archive Media Center recordings

D-Cut
D-Cut ranks up there with DVR 2 WMV as one of the most popular tools for processing dvr-ms.

Written on the side by Microsoft developer Dan Giambalvo and available from www.inseattle.org/~dan/Dcut.htm, D-Cut allows you to both edit and compress MCE recordings.

It also lets you do this from the comfort of the MCE user interface using the remote control.

Post-installation, D-Cut can be found under the More Programs section of the MCE interface. After selecting it, you’ll be given the choice of cutting a dvr-ms file or a WMV file. If you choose the former, you’ll be presented with a list of shows from your Recorded TV folder, although it will only list the contents of the primary, default Recorded TV folder and not any extra ones added through TweakMCE.

After selecting a file you can choose to edit and compress, edit only or compress only. If you choose to edit, D-Cut starts playing the file and lets you skip forward or back to the desired points and mark them using the remote control. You could delete the padding at the beginning and end of a recording, along with any ad breaks.

Select the option to ‘En-queue job’ and D-Cut will hand it over to a background service for processing, along with compression if requested. If you choose not to compress, the file format will stay the same, and if you select compression it will be converted into the WMV format.

D-Cut is one of the best programs for this kind of task, but it’s not without problems. We found it did the cutting part absolutely fine – and quite quickly too – but it consistently failed to complete compression on our test systems. Then again, D-Cut is designed to consume minimal resources in the background so as not to disturb the MCE user experience.

So maybe it was working, but just very slowly – if it ever completes a file we’ll let you know! While D-Cut also updates the new playing length of the file, there’s a shadow when fast-forwarding which reveals the original length.

It’s still recommended for cutting dvr-ms files using the MCE interface, though, and you could always use a different tool, such as DVR 2 WMV, to compress them later.

DVR-Edit
DVR-Edit is a standalone utility that operates outside the MCE interface and lets you crop recordings and cut out ad breaks. It’s written by Alex Seigler, part of the team behind DVR 2 WMV, and can be downloaded from http://thegreenbutton.com/files.

Once you’ve opened a file, DVR-Edit will allow you to mark in and out points by clicking on the square bracket icons. You surround the parts you want to keep with the brackets, so you would have, say, [first half of show] ad break [second half]. This would crop the beginning and end of the file and remove the middle segment.

Auto DVR Convert
Auto DVR Convert takes the simple but useful approach of stripping out the Mpeg-2 data from dvr-ms files, thereby opening up a much broader selection of editing, compression and re-authoring tools. This process also only takes a few seconds and you end up with a file that’s identical in quality to the original, but now compatible with a wider variety of programs. It’s another program you can download from http://thegreenbutton.com/files.

Finally, if you’re the technical sort, you might enjoy playing with the DVRMSToolbox, which offers a number of powerful tools for cutting and converting MCE recordings. Indeed, it’s sometimes required by additional utilities for performing the dirty work in the background.