mmatheny:

Nero 7 and up has a MC plugin that is supposed to speed up burning, but take any video file and burn it to a DVD with ANY program, it has to re-encode it, and takes 2-3 hrs. for an hour show.

It is true that anytime you have to transcode, it will take a very long time.  The issue I have here is that I thought most recorded tv is already MPEG2.  If burning to a DVD that is already MPEG2, do we really need to do a full transcode?  However, since I don't work on this part of the product, I could be very wrong and there could be some reason why it takes so long...

chakotay2:

Ok, it finally finished... Thanks!

Glad to hear it.  I asked around and there appears to be no good way of speeding it up short of using 3rd party apps.  And even then--as chakotay2 pointed out--the speed gain will probably only be nominal.

mikdav:

mmatheny:

Nero 7 and up has a MC plugin that is supposed to speed up burning, but take any video file and burn it to a DVD with ANY program, it has to re-encode it, and takes 2-3 hrs. for an hour show.

It is true that anytime you have to transcode, it will take a very long time.  The issue I have here is that I thought most recorded tv is already MPEG2.  If burning to a DVD that is already MPEG2, do we really need to do a full transcode?  However, since I don't work on this part of the product, I could be very wrong and there could be some reason why it takes so long...

Okay..so CD/DVD burn is one of the WMC features that I inherited.  Here's a brain dump of what I know about our CD/DVD burn engine....The CD/DVD burn engine hasn't changed since Vista.  It is shared between WMC and DVD Maker.  And yes, most of the time is taken up during the transcoding process in an attempt to make a WTV file fit to a DVD.  Finally, note that this old burn engine was originally 3rd party code that we purchased the rights to....thus debugging and fixing issues with this burn engine is very difficult.