Onlydarksets

I have a ton of archived TV shows recorded in Vista Media Center that I processed with DVRMSToolbox (i.e., removed commercials, converted to WMV, and copied over all of the metadata), but they didn’t fit in well in Sage’s “Videos” structure.  After converting a few shows using SageMC, I realized that you can have pretty [...]

Long Zheng posted a link on his blog to a Microsoft-produced retrospective of the last decade of Media Center versions (also posted by Brent at GeekTonic, which reminded me to write on this).  It’s time for Microsoft to uncouple Media Center from the OS. I jumped ship from Vista Media Center almost 6 months ago, and [...]

Looks like Windows 7 will support DivX and XviD, in addition to H.264 and MP4.  It’s about time.

Mediamote (iTunes link) is a remote control app that allows the iPhone to control VMC. Not much to look at or in the description: “Mediamote is a remote control for Windows Media Center.” Some more screenshots would be nice.  I’m curious how much data is pulled under the REC’D TV, Guide, Live TV, and DVD [...]

Way back when, I setup Expression Encoder to convert my DVR-MS files to WMV (for size and portability).  One thing I found was the command-line switch to make the conversion run at close to real-time, even for HD.  While I assume this will work with the new WTV format (and EE 2, for that matter), [...]

Update: You have to disable the service, not stop it.  And, you have to also disable the “Windows Media Center Scheduler” service. ehrec.exe ties up the tuners, so you can’t run an alternate media center while running VMC (or MCE).  Just stop disable the “Windows Media Center Receiver” service, and you should be good to [...]

I currently have babgvant’s excellent DVRMSToolbox setup to automatically find commercials, strip them out, use Expression Encoder to convert to WMV, and then tag the files appropriately (Title, Subtitle, Type, etc.).  I have a profile setup for HD and for SD sources, and everything works pretty much perfectly. Anticipating the iPhone, though, I need to [...]

Update: Here is a better description of the solution. Andy posted some code a while back to get metadata from a DVR-MS file, and I needed something similar for WMV.  Luckily, it seems to work on any file with metadata.  It won’t grab it all (e.g., season and episode), but it gets a lot of [...]

The HDHomeRun is a network-based dual-ATSC tuner device.  While the fact that you can keep the tuners outside the PC box is intriguing, the real power of the HDHR is that it was the first ATSC tuner to create a BDA-wrapper to allow you to record unencrypted-QAM in Vista Media Center (it also works with [...]

This is the second step in setting up an HDHR with Vista Media Center (step one is here).  The HDHR instructions are kind of lacking, so hopefully this will help someone else out.  The screencaps are pretty self-explanatory, so there are only a few captions where necessary.  It is screencap-intensive, so it’s after the break.