Over the last week I set myself a mini-project of making three improvements to my Windows Media Center setup.

  1. Compress recorded shows older than 30 days in WMV to save space.
  2. Moved older shows (compressed or not) to a network share to save space.
  3. Virtualizing Media Center under Windows Home Server

The results? Complete failure on the first two, and some success on the third but that was ultimately dependent on getting #2 working.

This one of those experiences with Media Center when I start to look at the price of a Season 3 TiVo + lifetime pass. My Media Center’s over three years old now I’ve basically been holding off till a nice (e.g. small) CableCard system becomes available, and/or I know it’ll still work with protected content after upgrading to Windows 7.

I’m happy to trade the out-of-the-box convenience of TiVo for the increased flexibility of Media Center, but at times Media Center seems to have difficulty with scenarios that are clearly popular and this gets frustrating. I love Media Center, but it does seem to have an identity problem.

Anyhow, here are my experiences;

Compress older shows to WMV

Using MCEBuddy I had the compression step working in almost no time at all. MCEBuddy is a really nice program that’s well done – simple to use and setup. I chose the WMV compression option since it would cover all of my devices (Windows Media Center, Extenders and the XBox) and set it to convert a few really old 50+ day programs.

After it’d completed I noticed that the shows were no longer visible in the “Recorded TV” section, despite being in the same location with the same filename. After much puzzling and Googling, it turns out that Media Center will only show DVR-MS in the “Recorded TV” section.

Yeah, there are meta-data aspects to consider but this limitation is a bit annoying. Being limited to using the “Video” section, whose interface is poor and needs careful categorization to be useful, makes this rapidly lose its appeal. It’s a shame because this (background WMV encoding) could be a killer feature for Media Center.

Move old shows to a network share

Accessing a network share and moving old files here is super-easy, but getting Media Center to display those shows is complex and something I just couldn’t get working.

There’s a large number of “how to” guides that cover the the numerous steps and registry and/or policy editor tweaks needed on the both machines, but for whatever reason it would just never work. I added the watched locations correctly and could see/open the files in Explorer, but to Media Center they just did not exist and would not appear in the Recorded TV section.

In the past I’ve found Media Center’s support for network-shared media is poor, and this seems to be another example. For a digital home product I have trouble understanding why this is the case, though at least this does seem to be changed in Windows 7