So....  as I understand things so far this is what we've got:

Codec       Compatibility

NvDVD       Yes
WinDVD 2.5  Maybe
WinDVD 3.2  Maybe
WinDVD 4    No, but maybe over RDP and in compatibility mode
WinDVD 5    No, but maybe over RDP and in compatibility mode
PowerDVD    Unknown
ATI         Unknown

 

Can anyone add to or improve upon this list and can anyone find the NvDVD codec anywhere ?? 

Cheers and Keep up the good work

Golfy

 

Now that with VBR MED/LOW removed, some compressed files are getting a little too BIG to fit onto a CD-RW.  It would be great if we can have an option to adjust the compression ratio, or have a few profiles with different compression ratios to choose from.

Thanks,
Shawn 

 

---

Dell Dimension 4600 2.4GHz 1GB
WMCE 2005 SP2 Rollup 2+
ATI AIW 9600 PRO, Omega Driver
AverMedia A180 HDTV
Creative SB Audigy
Issues:
1. MCE hangs recording off both tuners for hours
2. Audigy 2 Sampling Rate 96kHz does not stick after wake up

No combination of intermediate filters could be found to make the connection. The program will now exit.  = Your DVD decoder is not supported. Try compatibility mode or a different DVD decoder.

LooneyTunes - Looking into it to see if I can Repro this.

Shawn - You can use the Windows Media Encoder Profile Editor to make your own profile. See the following URL for a small tutorial:

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/moviemaker/expert/customprofile.asp

---

Jeff Griffin
www.jeffreygriffin.com

Is anyone going to be a guinea pig and try WinDVD 6?

http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Home.jsp

 

Win DVD 4.x seems to be working for me on my MCE 2004 (Windows XP SP1 + all updates) box both with and without compatibility mode.

My other boxes are using nvDVD.

---

--
James Edelen
Microsoft MVP - Windows XP M

A few notes on RC 3.5 ..

1. Standalone - When multiple files are queued for conversion, the first one gets processed, and then the application shuts down. In RC 2/3  it would thrown an exception, now it does not even do that.
2. Standalone - would be nice to have an "Estimated time to completion" for the current file.  Should be easy enough to "estimate" give the length of the clip, the length converted and what is left.
3. CMD Line - Not able to output the file using the Title-Subtitle format. 
4. CMD Line - The "delete" after converted option only deletes the file(s) after all of them are converted, and not after each file is converted. If I was converting a directory with 100 files in it, it would be nice to delete them as soon as they were processed. (Not sure if the Standalone does this as well becuase I can't get it to work).

Roy

 

 

 

I get the same problem with a batch conversion in standalone.

First file goes great, but then the 2nd or 3rd just drags on for hours and hours.  It's only hour shows I'm converting and using a 1000kbs profile (cbr).

Jeff, if there's something you'd like me to do to try and debug let me know.

I have been converting many files (8 good ones and a half-dozen more to test different settings) with no problem.  Now I have two DVR-MS files that act as if they are converting properly, but they only result in a single, zero-length file, named as the show should be named, but with no extension.  For example, the show should be "Good Eats - Crepes" and should have a WMV, BIN, and SMI file.  Instead, there is just one zero-length file named "Good Eats - Crepes" with no extension.

I was using the DVR 2 WMV Standalone program.  Both files were edited with DVR Edit, both are about 20 minutes and 1 GB in size.  Other shows of the same size and length are convering fine, just not these two.  Any ideas?

---

Alex S. Brown
webmaster@alexsbrown.com
http://www.alexsbrown.com

Personally, I like your solution with the "^" symbol.  My advice -- keep it!

If it really bugs you, you could replace it with a special message like "(Music)", but then you need to worry about multi-language support.  I say, stick with the carret (^).

---

Alex S. Brown
webmaster@alexsbrown.com
http://www.alexsbrown.com

Sorry for cluttering the board with lots of small posts, but I keep finding odd, little things.

When you exit the Standalone application, there is a DVR2MWV process that continues to run even after the main UI application shuts down.  It continues to write out the BIN file and then generate the SMI files.  It can be pretty CPU-intensive, and it seems to run even after you hit "Cancel" and then exit the application.

I recommend not allowing the Standalone UI to close down completely until that application has run its course.  You might also want to give the user the option after they hit Cancel or exit the application, if it still needs to run -- "Caption files being generated, press Cancel to stop".  That way the user can really stop DVR2WMV from running completely, delete the files and start over.

Sometimes I want to stop a conversion and start over, but because this process locks up the BIN file, I need to wait for it to run its course before I can delete the old files and restart.

Again, a truly little thing.  I also suspect that it only affects the minority of users who activate the caption option.

---

Alex S. Brown
webmaster@alexsbrown.com
http://www.alexsbrown.com

Interesting.... All very interesting....

Well I am honestly not too sure about much of this but am in the process of updating the way the conversions are run to hopefully fix things <fingers crossed>. The MCE version has been updated and is testing as we speak. Now I just need to update the standalone version. In the process of all this updating I have added a logging feature to hopefully get us some info on what is going on during the conversion.

What I need from yall: Please make sure that your TGB profile has an email where I can reach yall at (or if you don't want to do that please email me jeff@thegreenbutton.com). It will be a couple days before I have the whole program updated and have ate my own dogfood for a bit, but after that I am going to want to get this updated version out to a few of yall so we can activate the logging and see what is up.

That being said PLEASE keep the problems, comments and suggestions coming! They can't hurt anything and they definitely help.

---

Jeff Griffin
www.jeffreygriffin.com

Jeff,

   Adding support for the ATi DVD Decoder would be a great idea. It's the best decoder right now for MCE2004.

Jeff - James,

Am I blindly missing the parameter to utilize the "sensible naming convention" that is in the StandAlone version.  I see the "reverse" but not the other option which gives readable filenames.  Let me double check to make sure it's not my stupidity missing it.

Thx let me know

Jeff,

Thanks for the quick reply and the URL for making my own profiles!

On a different issue, I think I found a bug!  DVR2WMV does not convert correctly when both of the following are true:

1. Title-Subtitle naming turned ON
2. The recording has a title with colon (:) in it.

For example, when the program title is "Travel: Journey to Mars", dvr2wmv creates a file named "Travel" without a file extension(!), when the progress bar continues to advance normally.  In the end, "Travel" has 0 bytes in it.

I suspect dvr2wmv was trying to create a file with a colon (:) in the filename and messed things up.  There are a few of those characters that Windows filenames will choke on.  Maybe dvr2wmv can convert those characters to something like a comma (,).

Current Workaround: Turn off Title-Subtitle naming.

Keep up with the great work!!!

Shawn

---

Dell Dimension 4600 2.4GHz 1GB
WMCE 2005 SP2 Rollup 2+
ATI AIW 9600 PRO, Omega Driver
AverMedia A180 HDTV
Creative SB Audigy
Issues:
1. MCE hangs recording off both tuners for hours
2. Audigy 2 Sampling Rate 96kHz does not stick after wake up

OK - So I jumped in and tried WinDVD 6 and here's what I've learnt....

With compatibility mode switched on I've sucessfully encoded Audio but not Video. So something's happening but I don't know what. I'm hoping that with Jeff's next release I might be able to work something out from the logging.

Codec       Compatibility

NvDVD       Yes
WinDVD 2.5  Maybe
WinDVD 3.2  Maybe
WinDVD 4    No, but maybe over RDP and in compatibility mode
WinDVD 5    No, but maybe over RDP and in compatibility mode
WinDVD 6    Audio in compatibility mode
PowerDVD    Unknown
ATI         Unknown

Good work Jeff & co.

Cheers
Golfy