Recently I started to setup my Vista desktop machine to double as our dvr, recording TV shows which we watch on our media center pc in our living room. These videos are DVR-MS files and they are MPEG-2 encoded. The files are huge– 1 hour of Monk eats up 3 gigs for best quality recoding! For the life of me I couldn’t find a configuration Windows Media Center to use more efficient codecs. Perhaps a reader of this blog can enlighten me.
Anyhow, the best workaround I’ve found is MCE Buddy: a windows service that automatically re-encodes the video files to other ideal formats like H.264 & DivX behind the scene. Added bonus: the program claims to be able to automatically removes comercials! Sweet!
This is jumping through a hoop, I wish the video codec was configurable in the first place to avoid this re-encoding business. I suspect copyright protection has something to do with the missing codec configuration. Annoying nevertheless.