OK, I’ve been right-clicking on Windows Media Center .wtv files and selecting “Convert to dvr-ms” one at a stinking time so I can then convert that to a format that’s able to be written to a DVD for playing anywhere, and it’s gotten old already. Yeh, yeh, call me lazy. Call me doubly lazy, since I could just set up another external drive (but make it a humongous 1.5TB drive, cos the files are about 3GB per hour of recorded video) to store the things on. But. keeping wtv files isn’t in the cards for me anyway, since some programs also record with DRM junk that voids the recording after a given period of time. Not appreciating DRM. (Anti-DRM: I still have some old Tom Baker “Dr. Who” episodes on VHS. No making unplayable by remote DRM management for those puppies, and I’m NOT accepting it now for new recordings.)
Dug around, and other folks feel the same way. Here’s a possible solution: WTVWatcher. I’ve scanned the thing for malware every which way from Sunday and it has come up clean so far. Does it work? Well, yes, it does. It watches the folder I specified (NOT my Recorded TV folder, another one where I put recordings I want converted), and then automagically converts whatever .wtv files are in the folder to dvr-ms. From there, I can convert the dvr-ms files into whatever I want to burn to optical media. Heck, for the shows that are going to be viewed on the old analog TV, that can even be avi onto CD! It’s as good as old VHS…
WTVWatcher uses the WTVConverter.exe app that’s included in the \\Windows\ehome folder where WMC resides. It’s the same app that’s invoked when using the right-click>convert to dvr-ms context menu schtick, but the script just automates it by watching the folder specified by the user and converting any and all .wtv files there. Easy-peasy, and seems to work just fine.
One word of caution: when the thing converts .wtv files to .dvr-ms it also automatically deletes the .wtv files. For me, this is a good thing. YMMV.
Additional thought: I had attempted to use WTVConverter on one .wtv file and kept getting a “WTVConverter cannot convert the file from wtv to dvr-ms… ” error, and this whether I attmpted to perform the conversion via the RIGHT-CLICK context menu or via the command line. But this lil script that uses WTVConverter to do its work churned right on through the file and produced a usable dvr-ms file. Strange. But good.
BTW, I hate commercials, so…
Trying out LifeExtender to remove commercials from dvr-ms files. I’ll drop back by to comment on how it does its job. It was written for Vista, hence the tailoring for .dvr-ms files, and hasn’t been updated for almost 2 years. I hope that’s because it works just fine the way it is. 😉
Update: OK, LIfeExtender (so-called, because it gives one back the minutes that commercials steal *heh*) does work, and as far as I can tell hasn’t caused any video loss, but be warned: it’s a slow process. I had to just let it run while I went on and did other things, but it took several hours to scan and remove commercials from 10 programs–all but one just one-hour programs. Do note that LE isn’t perfect. It glitched up a tad on one episode of one show, inserting 20 minutes of blank screen, though none of the show was lost, and every now and then, tiny pieces of commercials remain. Still, it’s a heck of a lot handier than editing the files manually.
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