Minor Gripe With Win7 Disappears

The chief appeal of Windows 7 for me has been the much-improved Windows Media Center. In fact, WMC is what convinced me to finally bid farewell to all my travails attempting to make an HTPC work right in Linux.*

But.

The proprietary “wtv” format WMC uses to record television shows has been the one and only gripe I’ve had. Every now and then, I’ve made desultory searches for a way to deal with the issue of burning off DVDs from WMC, since doing it “the Microsoft way” results–at best–in archive copies that are good for that alone, copies that cannot be played in an ordinary DVD player.

Now, that’d be OK if I had also gotten off my lazy butt and finally built a media server and connected it to TVs that we want to view the files from, but I’ve not, and my schedule looks to become hectic in the coming months, so something to convert the files would be nice.

Here it is. Simple really. Win7 already has a built-in .wtv-to-.dvr-ms file conversion facility. From there, it was a simple thing to find a free (yeh, I am a tightwad) utility to convert the file to something usable on an ordinary DVD player.

Bob’s your uncle.

Of course, later on, with file storage on the NAS I’ll build when I get a round toit (I lost mine somewhere and need a new one) and a media server the files can be accessed through, this will become less of an issue, but for now, DVD-Rs are cheap and easy to burn.

Finally.

It’d still be nice if M$ didn’t cause this kind of thing with its proprietary file formats, but the workaround is actually simple enough, and WMC is still far, far easier to implement and use, and more “complete” than any other approach I’ve found.

*Don’t get me wrong. I still use Linux Mint for a primary work platform (and other OSes for other uses), just running in a Virtualbox VM on a Win7 host. It’s just easier that way to have the advantages of Linux and still use WMC to record those shows we do want to watch, but in “time-shifted” mode–in better-than-hulu quality.