Monday, September 24, 2007

Managed DVR-MS Fun

Stephen Toub - Fun with DVR-MS (now on my blog)

"...

DVR-MS files are created by the Stream Buffer Engine (SBE) introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 1, and are used by Media Center for storing recorded television. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how you can use DirectShow to work with and manipulate DVR-MS files. In the process, I’ll show you some useful utilities I’ve created for processing DVR-MS files, and will provide you with the tools and libraries you’ll need to write your own. So, open Visual Studio .NET, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the ride.

..."

This article is just about everything you need to know (well at least get you started) playing, transcoding, reading the metadata and editing DVS-MS (Media Center recorded content) files in C#, with some P/Invoke along for the ride.

One of my very low priority "I want do to's" is to build a simple DVR-MS viewer.

Media Player is almost good enough for me, but it doesn't have a 30-second skip button. I love that feature. Media Center's replay is almost good enough (as it has forward and backward skipping), but it's the sorting capability doesn't fit my needs (whereas Media Player lets me sort my recorded shows well enough.).

I want to be able to order my recorded TV shows by original air date and have a 30 second (at least) forward skip feature. So being a programmer I thought I'd just write my own viewer.  ;)

I think Stephen's article gives me all the information I need to get started. Now all I have to do is resurrect my Media Center so I can get at my recorded shows... dogh!

2 comments:

Christopher Estep said...

Media CENTER does have a skip forward and back. They work both in XP and Vista.

They should be set to CTRL+F as a default forward and CTRL+B as a back. I believe it defaults to 30 forward and 7 sec back.

Media PLAYER on the other hand doesn't have that and it irritates me to no end.

My big problem with MC is that it's so bloated that it's slow. I like "snappy" and MC is anything but.

Greg said...

I hear ya...

I want the best of both worlds, the cool sorting available in Media Player and the cool Forward/Backward skip in Media Center.

Time to for me to write some code...

:)