wtv files - convertion and playing using xbmc
#1
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 Huh)
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#2
i haven't used this myself, but you can give this a try

http://wtvwatcher.codeplex.com/documentation
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#3
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.
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#4
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?
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#5
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
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#6
Thanks so much for all the posts! I will give it a try
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#7
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 awesomeSad 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.
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#8
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?
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#9
avus m3,

How did you get the task scheduler to work? I keep getting an error when it runs. Did you add an argument?
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#10
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.
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#11
Quote: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 forma

http://mctvconverter.vivolum.net/

I use "MC-TV Converter." After experiments with DVR-MS ToolBox, MCEbuddy, Lifextender, and others, I found this one to be the simplest and most effective.

How I use it: I set MC-TV Converter to watch my Windows 7 Media Center "Recorded TV" directory, specifying the *.TS profile included. When a new recording completes, MC-TV Converter takes the streams inside the *.wtv file and re-wraps them in the *.ts format. I then have XBMC looking at the output directory, and it is able to playback the *.ts files without a problem. Because this doesn't re-encode anything, and keeps the raw contents just in a new container, the process is REALLY quick for each file (less than five minutes on a Core2Quad processor).

Bonus of this app is that it will create a *.srt file with any subtitles included in the original recording.

MC-TV converter also has a ComSkip profile (i.e., for creating an MPG file from WTV, scanning it, then producing another MPG without the commercials), but I've had issues with that profile and have always found ComSkip to be too imprecise for my tastes. So I stick with the *.TS profile, and have complete, unedited Win7 MC TV recordings available via XBMC.

In theory, if one were to use an HDHomeRun for live TV in XBMC, then use this solution for recorded TV from win7 media center, it'd be a near complete XBMC-as-TV-and-PVR solution...
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#12
Thanks guys for all the alternative suggestions to MCEBuddy. I recently acquired a new machine that was loaded with tons of recordings that I wanted to watch over the network with XBMC. MCEBuddy does okay, but noticed some audio sync issues and it's so slow it will never get through it's backlog and keep up with what I'm recording currently...
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wtv files - convertion and playing using xbmc0