Windows Media Center encodes its recording to DVR-MS (Microsoft Digital Video Recording). It’s video is encoded using the MPEG-2 standard and audio using MPEG-1 Layer II or Dolby Digital AC-3 (ATSC A/52). The result is high quality video with top quality audio to match. Only one problem, quality comes at a hefty price.
One minute of audio/video footage takes up about 116,521 kB (113 MB) of space! Considering that an average movie is about 90 minutes long, it would require at least 10,241 MB (10 GB) of storage to store one movie. So with my 1TB hard drive, I could store a measly 100 movies. Now that’s just ridiculous! I guess Microsoft doesn’t want to encourage TV recording through Windows Media Center. That’s the only conclusion I can come up with because there are loads of other trusted high quality standards that they could have used to encode video/audio. Like DivX.
Luckily for us, there’s a useful utility that we can use to convert DVR-MS to DivX. The software is called MCEBuddy. MCEBuddy takes your LARGE DVR-MS television recording files and makes them small by converting to another format saving you disk space. I’ve searched high and low for a utility or script that converted DVR-MS to another format successfully. MCEBuddy is by far the best software for the job. Visit MCEBuddy website http://mcebuddy.com/.
