Now that we have DVB-T Radio and recording support in Media Center 2005 UR2 wouldn’t it be good to have it on your MP3 player or Portable Media Center?
Unfortunately the radio stations are recorded as audio only DVR-MS files, a format which fails to play on a Portable Media Center (after being synced to the My TV folder), and will not sync to a player such as a Creative Muvo because it is not a device that supports video formats (Media Player is set up to expect that this kind of file is TV).
If you want to extract the audio a ‘simple’ way to do it is to use an application called graphedit. This exists as part of the DirectX programmers SDK and can be used to create a graph which opens the dvr-ms file and writes it as an MP3. To do this
1. If you don’t have GraphEdit download a copy here (The latest version from the DirectX 9 SDK is not absolutely required for this)
2. Extract the files to a sensible location (i.e. c:\graphedit rather than your desktop) and register dump.ax by going to Start > Run and entering regsvr32 <path>\dump.ax
3. Run GraphEdit and go to File > Render Media File
4. Navigate to the Recorded TV, for types of file select ‘All Files’ and select the radio DVR-MS file.
5. This will automatically create a graph, since we only care about the Audio select ‘Decrypt/Tag0002, your video decoder (e.g. ‘NVIDIA Video Decoder’), Video Renderer and press delete. Also Select the ‘Default DirectSound Device’ filter and press delete.
6. Select Graph from the menu and select Insert Filter.
7. Expand Audio Compressors and select ‘MPEG Layer-3’ followed by Insert Filter.
8. Move down the filter list and expand ‘DirectShow Filters’, from this group insert ‘Dump’ into the graph (will not exist unless dump.ax is registered). Upon doing this a dialog window will be shown saying ‘select an output file for this filter to use’, select a folder and then call your file Something.mp3, close the filter insert window.
9. Two new filters will now have appeared on your graph called ‘MPEG Layer-3’ and ‘Something.mp3’. Drag from the ‘Audio Output’ pin of your MPEG Audio Decoder (e.g. ‘NVIDIA Audio Decoder’) and connect it to the Input of ‘MPEG Layer-3’.
10. Next connect the output of ‘MPEG Layer-3’ to the Input of ‘Something.mp3’
11. Hit the play button below the options menu to start, depending how large the file is this may take some time.
Now unfortunately the MPEG Layer-3 filter we’ve just used is limited to producing MP3s at a maximum of 56kbit/sec, which unless you are listening to speech isn't really good enough. What we could do is swap out the MPEG Layer-3 filter for something a little less restrictive, such as a version of the LAME MP3 encoder that has a DirectShow interface. Alternatively you can choose another codec entirely provided you have suitable DirectShow filters.
sample.mp3 (75.86 KB)