A great little utility that I’ve been using for the last few days is one called DVR 2 WMV. As the name suggests it converts DVR-MS Media Center recordings into Windows Media 9 videos. Various beta versions have been around for a while but I was unable to get it to work with my PAL DVB-T recordings correctly. The RC 3.5 version however has been working very nicely, using the PRX encoding profiles supplied with the application allowed me to get a 30 min recording (1.10Gb) down to 380Mb in CBR mode. But if you fancy building your own custom PRX profiles you can take more control over the conversion. Really the result you end up with is quite impressive. MPEG2 isn’t really the best format to be holding your media around in if you have a lot of it that you wish to keep. Performance isn’t too shabby either which is always nice.

The application has 2 major modes, a regular desktop standalone application, a Media Center application (ala Primetime). There is in addition a command line edition which is pretty nice as with one command you can tell it for example to convert every recorded instance of shows which share a common title.

To any Media Center owner, it’s really worth checking out.

http://www.nacontap.com/dvr2wmvrc35.cfm

Conversion By: Alex Seigler

CC Extraction By: José Peña

Command Line By: James Edelen

UI By: Jeff Griffin