I've been using
MCE 2005 for a little while now, and I am smitten.
What's more, my wife loves it too, and our MCE box has become one of
the most used pieces of electronic equipment in the house.
However, since I installed MCE, last April, I have never been able to
figure out how to dump recorded TV onto DVD - that is until now.
Until recently, I only saw the "Data DVD" option.
For those of you unaware, MCE likes to record TV in a bastardized form
of
MPEG2, called
DVR-MS. Microsoft never do anything just for the
fun of it, and I am certain that their decision for using a
non-standard media format has a lot to do with preventing users from
saving recorded TV to DVD, as well as to provide
DRM ability. A native install of MCE will let you record the
DVR-MS files directly to a data DVD, to be played on another MCE unit, but not
as a DVD to be played on a standalone player.
Fortunately, there is a third party encoder, called
Sonic Encoder,
which will stream DVR-MS direct to DVD in MPEG2 format, for playing
externally. A few OEM releases of MCE come shipped with this
encoder, but the rest of us using retail or developer versions have to
obtain the encoder via some other means. After doing some digging
on the web, I found the following link to a site that has
sonicencoder.msi for download:
http://www.ukshazam.com/download/
I am doubtful that this link will remain active for long, in which case
drop me a friendly email, and I could be persuaded to send you a copy
(please try downloading from the link first, before contacting me).
As I write this post, I am in the process of writing an 1h25 minute
show to DVD. So far the process has been running for about 40
minutes and is about a quarter of the way through - a little slow, but
comparable to other media transcoder packages. The show is an XVID
file, stored on a network drive, which will cause a detrimental affect
on performance. I'll see if regular DVR-MS to DVD is any faster later.