wtv files - convertion and playing using xbmc

Hi,

I use Windows media center (using windows 7) to record all my tv programs and put it into my NAS.

From the NAS I would like to play it using XBMC interface (VIDEO).

The problem is that the file has WTV extension and I read somewhere in the forums that XBMC cannnot decode this file format.

However, If you right click the file there is an option "convert to .dvr-ms format and when I do it xbmc is able to read it!

Is there a way to automate this conversion? All i want is convert all .wtv files to .dvr-ms files (any expert in windows scripting! xcopy )

i haven't used this myself, but you can give this a try

http://wtvwatcher.codeplex.com/documentation

I use MCEbuddy for this. It monitors your recorded TV folder, does commercial skip, converts the .wtv file to various formats, sorts them by folder and deletes the .wtv file.

itchy_balls Wrote:I use MCEbuddy for this. It monitors your recorded TV folder, does commercial skip, converts the .wtv file to various formats, sorts them by folder and deletes the .wtv file.

Checking it out...looks cool. Do you use 1.x or are you trying out the 2.0 beta?

avus m3 Wrote:Checking it out...looks cool. Do you use 1.x or are you trying out the 2.0 beta?

1.x i believe

Thanks so much for all the posts! I will give it a try

I pretty much spent the whole day yesterday doing some research. I found and am now using a program called MCEZ Sort that automatically renames and sorts if you wish shows names. You can changed the format you want containing the season, episode numbers, and even the episodes name. For example: "My Name Is Earl.S04E10.Earl And Joys Anniversary". This way XBMC can scrape the files properly!

Then I have MCEbuddy rip the commercials out and compress them (using no resize and 2 pass) into H.264 in my XBMC "TV Shows" directory. I am setting it up to be automatic by creating a scheduled task. Pretty cool stuff.

Just FYI on the size reduction...so far I am seeing WTV files about 3.5gb getting shrunk down to ~ 350-425mb using the settings mentioned before (comskip, no resize, and 2 pass)!! It does take a bit of time using these settings though...then again I have like 250gb of recorded shows to be converted. Once through this big chunk, nightly maintenance of newly recorded shows won't be so bad.

Now if I had a usenet account to download non OTA shows with Sick Beard, the setup would be awesome Live TV would make xbmc a total package for me...until then I will use WMC 7 with these programs.

For those interested, here's a link to download MCEZ:
http://rs78.rapidshare.com/files/2475314....0.1.7.zip

I would set it to run 2 or 3 times before MCEbuddy does its thing. I noticed that sometimes it will skip some files the first time through. Make sure you edit the config before use for things such as setting it true to use WTV and true to create folders (unless you want to manually specify) for shows it hasn't seen yet.

Maybe I'll create a thread about this program later once I get more time with it.

If I'm willing to keep the files essentially as-is (i.e., don't remove commercials or further compress the file), what's the *fastest* way to get these files into an XBMC-compatible format?

avus m3,

How did you get the task scheduler to work? I keep getting an error when it runs. Did you add an argument?

I ditched the notion as of right now. MCEBuddy is an automatic no go after using it a bit. There is a problem with mencoder. It introduces audio sync issues, cuts out some stuff that comskip didn't mark and other problems. I browsed their forum but it's a current issue.