Windows Media Center Tip: Burn DVR-MS Recorded TV To DVD

Intro

There seems to be a lot of confusion over how to burn a dvr-ms recorded tv show to a DVD that can be played in a stand-alone DVD player. Here are some programs you can use to burn and compress your dvr-ms files.

What is DVR-MS

When Microsoft Media Center records a TV show it is stored in a format called dvr-ms. Now I can only guess that ‘dvr’ stands for ‘digital video recorder’ and ‘ms’ stands for – well, we can probably all figure that one out. This dvr-ms format is basically a popular MPEG-2 video format with some ‘extras’ like certain copy protections and so forth. These files are very large due to the nature of trying to capture high resolution video – figure about 3.20 GB of hard drive space for 1 hour of recording. (Now you know why there are 250 GB hard drives on the market)

Burning a DVR-MS File to DVD

What everyone wants to do is to be able to burn a dvr-ms file to a DVD and then play that DVD in any standard DVD player. This functionality is built into Windows Media Center Edition 2005 – with some strings. In order to do this, you need to have the Sonic Encoder that is used to convert/compress/transcode/etc .the dvr-ms file to a playable MPEG-2 file. Now apparently you can’t buy this encoder (sonicencoders.msi) from Sonic but you can buy their DVD burning software PrimeTime that can create stand-alone DVD’s from your recorded TV shows. If you don’t have the Sonic Encoder installed, you still get a ‘create cd/dvd’ menu and you can create a DVD. Except it is a data DVD, meaning that it is burning the dvr-ms file as a dvr-ms file and you cannot play it in a stand-alone DVD player. I think this really confuses people and it’s a shame that some OEM’s omitted the encoder.

Here’s where it gets interesting – if you bought your Media Center PC from an OEM like HP or Dell, this should be installed for you and you are good to go. However, some OEM’s did not install this encoder (from what other people have said) and if you built your own system you did not get the Sonic Encoder with the retail OEM version of Windows Media Center Edition 2005. I did see where some people said that some OEM versions of Windows Media Center Edition 2005 came with three discs and the Sonic Encoder was on the third disc.

I’ll run down the programs you can use to burn your dvr-ms files to DVD and a quick overview of each.

Burning a DVR-MS File to DVD – Default Windows Media Center (using Sonic Encoder)

Let’s assume you have the Sonic Encoder installed on your system. When you go to your recorded TV folder, select a show you want to burn to DVD and then select the ‘more info’ button on your remote. This will pull up the menu to create a cd/dvd.

Once you select yes, then you are given the options of creating a data DVD, video DVD, or slideshow DVD. If you do not have the sonic encoder installed, you will not get this option and a data DVD will be created. Select ‘create DVD’ and the program creates your DVD in the background while you do something else.

I burned a 30 minute show in 5 minutes and it took up about 1.36 GB of space on the DVD. I was really amazed at how fast this was especially compared to the other options. The one thing you cannot do is edit the commercials. Some people are using other software programs to edit out the commercials in the dvr-ms file and then burning to DVD. The video quality was very good. This is the final product when you put it into a DVD player:

Burning a DVR-MS File to DVD– Using DVD Burning Software Nero

Let’s say you don’t have the Sonic Encoder installed – there’s still hope for you yet. A lot of DVD burning software such as Sonic Primetime ($79) and Nero support burning of dvr-ms files. I have Nero Vision Express which you can use to load up a dvr-ms file and burn to DVD or export to a different file format such as MPEG-2. Open the program and select create a movie if you want to save to your hard drive.

You can treat the dvr-ms file like any video file in Nero and you can edit out the commercials. Load up your dvr-ms file and then select ‘export’.

I exported a half-hour TV show to DVD quality MPEG-2 video and it took 2 hours and 1.23 GB of hard drive space. Using the default settings I wasn’t that impressed with the video quality.

Burning a DVR-MS File to DVD– Using Digital Media Converter

I found a program called the Digital Media Converter ($40) that will convert your dvr-ms file to all sorts of formats including DVD quality MPEG-2 and Windows wmv files. You simply load the file and then select the format you want to convert it to.

As advertised, there are a lot of formats to choose from.

I converted a 7 minute file to DVD and it took nearly an hour and 215 MB of hard drive space. The video quality was very good.

Burning a DVR-MS File to WMV– Using dCut

There is a free program available that will convert your dvr-ms file to a Microsoft wmv file called dCut. It has it’s own installer and works through the Media Center interface. You select which programs you want to convert and it runs the conversion.

Once you select a dvr-ms file from the list to compress to wmv format, you are given the option of editing it or just compressing it. I was not able to figure out how to edit out the commercials.

Once you select ‘compress’ it goes off and does the compression.

This program is different in that it submits your job over the internet apparently to a server somewhere in a que. There also always seems to be an executable running in my taskbar.

Update: I saw over on the Australian XP Media Center Community that I may have it wrong about how dCut actually works:

dCut doesn't submit jobs over the Internet, it runs an application on the taskbar which handles the compress/editing etc. This is where all jobs are queued and processed.

I converted a 30 minute file and it took one hour and 256 MB of disk space. The video quality was excellent.

Summary

If you have the right encoders installed you can burn a dvr-ms file to DVD right inside Media Center in a few minutes. If you don’t have the right encoders installed, you will have to use a separate application (some of them outside of the Media Center application) to burn a dvr-ms file to DVD. This does give you the ability to cut out the commercials. You can also use other programs (some within Media Center itself) to compress the dvr-ms file to other formats such as wmv to save hard drive space. Any way you go, Microsoft needs to do some work and offer all of the options (burn to DVD and compress to hard dive to save space) within the Media Center interface.