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The best way to Burn MCE DVRMS files to DVD
January 24, 2008
After experimenting with many different ways of converting Windows XP Media Center (.dvrms) files to DVD, I arrived at a solution that gives highly satisfactory results. As I know that there are people out there looking for a similar solution, i thought of documenting the process for their benefit.
I have the recording quality on my Windows MCE kept to the best available option. With this option an hour of recording usually comes to be dvrms file of about 4GB size.
The first step in my process is to use DCut to edit out the unwanted commercials and buffers at the beginning and end of the file. DCut is an easy to use program that is controlled with the MCE remote. I do not use the "compress" option only the "cut" option. The compress option converts the dvrms file to wmv. However I find that the resulting wmv file quality is quite bad.
The cut option of Dcut takes out the unwanted portions of the program and re-saves the file as a dvrms file. Those who do not want to cut out commercials can skip this first step.
The next step is to convert the dvrms file to wmv file using Windows Movie Maker. By default WMM does not take in dvrms files. However, this post explains how to work around this problem.
I import the dvrms file into windows movie maker and then drag it onto the story line. Note that while importing the file uncheck the option of creating clips. If this option is set, it will take a long time to import the file.
Then I save it out to the computer and use settings of 2Mbps for the output file option. Windows movie maker takes a while to save the file. On my computer, it take about 1 hour to save out a 1 hour program.
Once Windows Movie Maker has done its job, you have a wmv file ready to be burnt onto DVD. To burn the file, I use DVDFlick. It is a free (open source project) DVD authoring tool and it supports many formats. I find it to be very reliable. It has option of manually adjusting the bit rate if required.
DVDFlick also takes a while to do its job. Once it is finished, you have your DVD ready. Store it away in your DVD album case and you can now delete the huge dvrms files and also the intermediate wmv file.
Hope this description has helped you with your problem of converting dvrms files to WMV and then to DVD. If it has, I really appreciate it if you could leave a comment.
Posted by liveit at January 24, 2008 2:41 AM