OK, so Windows Media Center wtv files are huge. One hour? About 3GB. Didn’t take long for recordings of my Wonder Woman’s shows (well, and Chuck for me–nerd fantasies, ya know *heh*) to get above 200GB, so I needed a good way to archive ’em, and no, eating up storage on my external drives was not the answer.
Sure, it’s convenient for my Wonder Woman to be able to click a link I put on her desktop and simply open the files from my computer, but… that’s a lot of space to sit there just being used to store TV shows.
So, enter Free Studio Manager 4.3.5.73 (yes, it’s that particular iteration *heh*).
Now, I’ve tried a fair bunch of video conversion/DVD writer apps and all of them have their shortcomings. Free Studio Manager is no exception. It’s slow. OTOH, it’s free and it also has a ton of features. A ton. Converts nearly any video format to be burned to a playable DVD. Video to flash. Video to mp3, jpg, iPod, PSP, iPhone. Video dubbing, flip and roate and a few more lil features.
But wait, there’s more. 🙂 Youtube uploads/downloads. Converts many audio formats and burns music and data CDs DVDs. A real workhorse of a media suite. Free.
Now, I’ve multi-scanned the thing both before and after installation and nothing I’ve sicced on it has found any malware or other weird behavior from it, so my only (minor, petty, nit-picking) gripe is that video conversion is sooooo sloooooowww. Oh, and it throws “Disk Burning” errors if I allow it to convert a video and burn it to disk immediately, but since it’s not yet made a coaster with one of those errors, I’m not fashed by that. And, it’s not really a lot slower than others I’ve tried, well, except for Format Factory, which is pretty darned fast but just screws up too often for my taste–still worth every penny of its price (it’s free) but not for me.
So, reclaiming some hard drive storage and burning through a few DVDRs. Fine, as long as she can pop ’em in her DVD drive and watch ’em that way.
ADDENDUM: Oh, yeh, have to remember two things.
1. The weird WMC “wtv” file format. *sheesh!* MUST right-click on any recordings and choose “convert to dvr-ms” in Windows Explorer before using ANY free video conversion/DVD writing tool I’ve found. and
2. Some shows have expiration dates on them noted in DRM files that WMC builds when recording. Unless you store them in a different format that loses the WMC DRM info, they’ll not play. So, it behooves any of us using WMC to convert early and often… Just archiving the wtv files is NOT good enough!
I may have to try this. The price sounds about right for me.
Well, Perri, I must admit that was its first appeal. The second, of course, is as I stated: while it may take some time and throw an error now and then, I’ve yet to burn a coaster with it using my Lightscribe drive. (I’ve also not used the Lightscribe feature yet, though I plan on doing so for Lovely Daughter’s wedding album. But that’s something this app has nothing to do with, really.)
[edit]
First DVD burned with it was a 7GB recording of the opening episode of Caprica. Not all that great a show, but at least it worked. Most recent was an episode of Chuck I missed, neglected to schedule recording and didn’t want to watch on Hulu, so… found a place to download it as an avi file (sans commercials) and converted, then burned that. Worked like a charm. Didn’t really need to burn it, except that I also didn’t want it clogging up my hard drive, so…
Lemme tell you, with the new HD tuner I find my Media Center’s hard drive filling up MUCH faster than it used to.
I may have need of this pretty soon. Thanks for the tip.
One thing: readily accessible and well-indexed storage of these DVDs is going to be something I’ll need to implement. I have a “system” of sorts for my own CDs/DVDs, but since these are going to also be for my Wonder Woman’s (or really, any family member’s) use as well, I’ll need a better system that appeals to her Madam Librarian mindset. 🙂