MCE Buddy Rocks for 7MC Conversions and Commercial Skipping 5

Posted by JD 03/11/2010 at 08:29

I don’t know how to say this any clearer. MCE Buddy Rocks!. It is free, but they request a donation. I haven’t seen any nag-ware.

If you run Windows Media Center 7 and want to do anything with the TV tuner recorded files, check out MCEBuddy. It does the simple stuff by default. I suppose it will work with older versions of media center too, but cannot confirm that. What is the simple stuff?

Be certain to read the comments for more information. I’ve stopped using MCE Buddy.

  1. Convert from wtv to dvr-ms | you need this to do anything with the file. It converts over 20 formats.
  2. Run comskip on the dvr-ms files and have it output edl, txt and vpjr files. vprj files are good for VideoRedo.
  3. Convert the resulting file into almost any other video format – xvid, divx, mp4, x264, and others
  4. It watches directories that you specify (Recorded TV) and places the outputs where you specify (someplace else?)
  5. It runs as a service, so you need to manage the start/stop/manual/automatic settings in the normal Services panel.
  6. Controller icon sits in the System Tray
  7. The installation is trivial.
  8. The default settings are fine to get started.
  9. Commercial removal works well for the cheap, free cable channels. Not so good for mid and network channels with the default settings. I still need to figure out how to have different comskip.ini settings for different channels, but I’ve needed to do this for about 4 yrs.

A few months ago, I tried to use the more general MSDVRToolbox and failed. The complexity of the toolbox was beyond my desire to figure it out. It appears it can do anything, but it isn’t trivial to use. MCEBuddy is bonehead simple. I especially like that.

The three settings that I’d recommend changing at this point are

  1. the checkbox to remove commercials
  2. the default output format to either h.264 2-pass or mpeg
  3. in the comskip.ini, set the output_videoredo=1 setting; editing this file means fighting with administrator access – a normal user account doesn’t work.

Converting from .wtv to .drv-ms to .mpeg2 with my tuner does not change the quality of the video. Basically they are all mpeg2, just with a DRM/metadata wrapper around the real mpeg2 video. Any conversion beyond these 3 formats involves transcoding and should be avoided as much as possible. The last step for smaller files should be from mpeg2 with all commercials removed to h.264 using a 2 pass encode.

There are different downloads for the x32 and x64 versions of MCEBuddy. I initially grabbed the wrong version and the installation gave a nice, clear error. All my machines are x64 … except 7MC which is x32 (thanks to Microsoft for the free copy).

My Windows7 Media Center setup includes:

  • Core 2 Duo CPU
  • 2GB RAM
  • 250GB HD most files are moved to a storage server after processing
  • Win7 Ultimate includes Media Center with free schedule data thanks to MS
  • Hauppauge 950Q USB ClearQAM TV Tuner
  • About 100+ clearQAM channels over cable
  • MCE Buddy
  • VideoRedoPlus to validate commercial locations, cut them with single frame accuracy then output smaller mpeg2 files This program is the best $49 I’ve ever spent.
  • mencoder to convert from mpeg2 files to xvid and x264 in the future

That’s it. I’m a noob using MCEBuddy so there are probably things I’m missing, like how to keep the intermediate dvr-ms files. It isn’t perfect, but it is the best solution set that I’ve found.

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  1. JD 03/18/2010 at 13:39

    Just a quick update.

    I hate Commercials

    While MCEBuddy seemed to work, often it didn’t. I’d find that it had locked a file so I couldn’t get access to relocate it without a reboot. Perhaps a process was hung, I dunno. Regardless, after attempting to get it to work in the way I needed and failing, I’ve disabled the service and wrote a few tiny .bat programs to perform the things MCEBuddy did. They don’t fail, ever. Basically, each step is a bat program. Here they are:

    1. Convert from .wtv into .drv-ms; none of the tools work with .wtv files.
    2. Run the .dvr-ms file through VideoRedo, VRP, with a Quick Stream Fix option to remove frames that aren’t the same resolution as the main content. If this isn’t performed, bad things happen later causing program crashes. Sadly, the cmd line options to VRP don’t have the ability to run Quick Stream Fix in the same way that the GUI does. The program manual shows how to do it, but it doesn’t produce the same result and processing performed later will crash. This step also creates a .mpg file. This step isn’t needed for TiVo recorded files since they are all converted to the same resolution.
    3. Run comskip for batch commercial detection. Force it to output a .vrdp cut file.
    4. Manually open the .vrdp cut file (also opens the .mpg file) and verify the cut locations. They are about 80+% accurate, but sometimes 100% correct. Save the file without commercials into an .mpg file.
    5. If the file is to be added to my library, I’ll convert it to xvid/avi or x264/avi. As part of the transcode, cropping and scaling will be applied. Usually a 50% or more reduction in file size is achieved with only a minor loss in quality.

    The last step is not performed for 95% of the files, as most aren’t added to the library.

    I know this sounds like a lot of work. Because I’m lazy and automated most of it, it takes less than 2 minutes per file. Much of the processing handles all the files with a single request. Further, I’m working on a script to automatically run VRP with QSF to further reduce the amount of manual time per file. If my 7MC worked with a 30 sec skip, none of this would be done.

  2. JD 04/02/2010 at 11:13

    I’ve finally automated the QSF process too and posted a program to help others.

  3. JD 04/13/2010 at 06:25

    For the last few weeks, I’ve been testing a perl script that performs everything except the manual validation of the commercial cut locations automatically. That’s moving the files, converting, running QSF, running comskip – 100% automatic. It works well enough that I’m calling it done.

    Basically, I took each of the BAT files which automated 1 small part and built an all-in-one perl script to perform what each script did as needed. Honestly, it isn’t 100% perfect and gets hung up in the AHK portion sometimes, but that’s trivial to manually correct and pick up where it left off.

    Learn more about it here .

  4. george milton 08/28/2010 at 14:07

    Wow! closed source? Want to protect anyone from stealing and improving that hot random noob crap?? Might want to have your doors widened so you can get that head through.

    http://www.wonkygibbon.co.uk/263/video/batch-convert-wtv-files-to-dvrms-and-mpeg.htm

    Once you understand these simple free batches and implement the WTV to DVRMS to MPG there are a ton of easy ways to get MPG’s reduced to good small MP4 or AVI but many may opt to simply go from DVRMS to MP4 using MCEBUDDY which can be scheduled to run off hours such as set your Batch CMD scripts to run at 11PM after primetime recordings are done and then set MCEBuddy to run at 1AM through the morning hours to get all the heavy transcoding crunching done while the recorder is not running..

  5. JD 08/28/2010 at 18:53

    A) thanks for the feedback.
    B) thanks for the link – those batch files are more complex than required, but they probably work fine.

    c:\windows\ehome\WTVconverter.exe *.wtv
    worked for me.
    C) MCEBuddy was flaky on my system. I suspect it is less than perfect on some other people’s systems too. Deinstalled. It has been months, so I don’t recall the exact reasons anymore. I’m a Linux guy, not MS-Windows and batch is extremely limiting to me.
    D) Why didn’t I release the AHK script? The script was a kludge. Trying to control a GUI program by sending keystrokes isn’t very reliable. I was embarrassed about it. If the QSF process worked as desired with a cmd interface, then none of this would be needed. Only 1 person has downloaded the .exe file since it was posted. The rest of the downloads were from less than honorable web scrappers. Only the control of Video RedoPlus was automated in that AHK script. All the other automation was controlled in the perl. I haven’t used the windows perl script in about a month because I found it easier to automate on Linux.

    If anyone wants the AHK-QSF code, drop a comment here and it is yours. It isn’t pretty and I’m not proud about it. It works for 1 file at a time, provided the machine doesn’t go to sleep. I believe that was the issue that I had. Anyone with minimal AHK skills can easily reproduce the code in 10 minutes.

    I actually use the exact same .EXE that was posted on this site to automate the VRP-QSF processing. I have a hard time imagining that people are willing to have the required programs, located in the exact place they must be to work. Personally, I don’t use AHK for anything else.