There doesn’t seem to be a perfect way to trans-code seamlessly out of the box from MCE. I have used MCEBuddy in the past but once Microsoft introduced WTV I had to go back to MCEbuddy developer for updates which was behind and not without it’s own problems/bugs.
There are strings attached to this process. you’ll need a thumb-drive and the process will require you to transfer the files from thumb-drive back to your computer unless you’re comfortable playing off the thumb-drive and not tight on space. I do this to archive The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live. I’ll post later on how you can use wmv to stream to your Windows Mobile phone through the internet.
Step 1 Prepare drive
format the drive and decompress the following file into your thumb-drive. It is the files that were created from my Mobile Phone when synced with WMP. They contain the re-sized resolution and compression necessary to compress a 1.5 gig 1 hour lowest quality SD recording into a WM6 Resolution compatible WMV file approx 150megs. reasonable loss of quality for me, however if you wish to have better resolution, you may need to modify the files or grab a zune hd profile sync of WMP.
File:
WMP Sync XML Information (from htc touch paired with Win7)
Step 2 Sync
stick in thumbdrive, open WMP, remove previous sync partnership and then create one again. At this time you can specify what tv shows you want synced, by default windows media player will attempt to add everything, music, tv, video, the works. I just have 3 last episodes of Conan, SNL, and Falon. Sync should now be working
Step 3 Archiving
Now that videos are transferred, it’s time to do some cleanup. copy the files from your thumb-drive over to your hard-drive ideally from a folder that MCE can see. Recorded TV is probably not best place to put it because that folder is technically only for WTV files and you can’t be sure if files will be cleared up to save space. avoid deleting recordings from the thumb-drive, WMP will try to transfer missing videos upon next sync. Instead, delete tv recordings from MCE or in the recorded tv folder.
That’s it. All this is done without the aid of third party software. Not ideal, but it does work. I’ve investigated on possible ways to fake a shared folder as if it was a usb removable storage. However, so far, I was unable to locate one. It is unfortunate that WMP and MCE doesn’t offer an way to trans-code the file without introducing a secondary device to sync with.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Leave a Reply