[jamesp26]

Hi all,

I have been a Windows media centre user for as long as I can remember but several years ago got frustrated as it appeared the platform was going nowhere. Kodi stepped in and filled the blanks nicely giving me better access to my library and also iplayer, amazon prime etc. However, Freesat TV is still the most used platform in my house.

ServerWMC filled a Kodi gap nicely for us, and on the whole it works ok with restrictions that I know are down the wmc itself which make it a little slow.

With WMC being excluded from Windows 10 its time for a change. As a Linux guy at heart I have now installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my nl36 micro server along with tvheadened. I have bought a small hasswell machine as an openelec front end.

I am amazed how well it works. Tvheadend is super quick, can cope with freeview and freesat and can record everything on one mux. Guide data also works out of the box. Series record is not integrated in Kodi, but is handled fine in the tvheadend web interface.

My only problem is what to do with my old wmc recordings. It’s a huge library made up of mostly what the wife and son watch (Mr Tumble grrrrr!). The recoding metadata is therefore important. I have just added my old recorded TV folder into the Kodi video library but there is no scraper that can read the metadata of wtv files.

1. Has anyone done this move before and if so how did you solve the wtv problem? My ideas are:
Prey there is a wtv scraper, and I’ve just not found it yet!

2. Use a windows 7 vm on my Linux server that I can install serverwmc into and I can use 2 back ends in openelec. I don’t really want to so this but if it’s the only way….

Any advice from anyone whos been done this road before.
Many thanks!

[negge]

If you can somehow convert those WTV files to standard TS files then you can script together something which creates tvheadend metadata files for those recordings. They would then show up in the Recordings section just like your new recordings.

[negge]

I believe VideoRedo can convert WMC media files (without re-encoding). It's commercial software but the internet usually has a solution for that.

Edit: ffmpeg can do it too apparently.

[jamesp26]

Thanks for the reply.

I will look into the transcoding option. MCEBuddy can do this apparently and take the recording information. I still worry transcoding the library is going to take ages.

I came across this tool last night - https://wtvmetarenamer.codeplex.com/ . Not tried it yet but apparently can extract the episode details from the WTV files and rename the files. I will give it a go and let everyone know how it works! Fingers crossed.

[krustyreturns]

You can use serverwmc to remux the files to ts format before you give us the boot. It also would be time consuming, but there would be no losses due to transcoding - files will remain the same size though. You'll lose captions though if that matters.

[jamesp26]

You can use serverwmc to remux the files to ts format before you give us the boot. It also would be time consuming, but there would be no losses due to transcoding - files will remain the same size though. You'll lose captions though if that matters.

Its Microsoft i'm giving the boot with this one! If only they realised Media Centre was actually good and invested in it. It was the the Add-ons part they got wrong. Ironic that they are getting rid of it at a time when google are desperate to get their bozes in the living room.

How do i remux using serverwmc? I can't find info on how to do so.

[krustyreturns]

I mentioned it would be time consuming, right?

In the settings file of swmc set Debug_RemuxAllRecordings to true and set isDeletingTempStreamFiles to false. Then play the recordings in kodi to start the remux to ts. It will continue remuxing the wtv so long as the file is being played - but it remuxes much faster than playback so you don't have to watch them to the end, the ts file should completed in a few minutes. Also you can do them in parallel if you have multiple kodi clients. The ts files will be in your recorded tv folder inside the folder tempswmc.

also, don't forget to move the ts files to a new folder. When swmc restarts it automatically cleans this folder out.

[negge]

@kustyreturns while that approach may work, wouldn't it be better to just use ffmpeg to remux the videos?

[jamesp26]

Thanks for the suggestions all.

I've done a bit of testing and it seems that https://wtvmetarenamer.codeplex.com/ does exactly what I need. Its a powershell script that moves and renames WTV files to a format KODI can run a scraper against.

It struggled with some of the Freesat series names (for some reason a lot of the titles have 'New:' at the start and couldn't be recognised) so I butchered the script for my needs and pretty much everything gets recognised.

If anyone is going on the same journey more than happy to explain how i did this!

[MasterYous]

I will agree that the script referenced at https://wtvmetarenamer.codeplex.com is a fantastic piece of work. I used to rename over 100 wtv files to a format I could scrape. Thanks!