WTV????????

My wife’s in hospital and the Media Center is filling up!  I can’t risk deleting too many “So you think you can dance?” without her noticing….

It seemed simple enough.  Transfer those annoying recorded TV programs from my Windows 7 media center to a hard drive, which my wife could then view via an old Windows XP laptop.

I did so, even cleverly installing Media Player 11 on the XP computer, just in case…..then I discovered that my files were no longer in “dvr-ms” format, but were in some new thing called “wtv” format.

Guess what?  Can’t play em in XP.

This also explains why the excellent “Life Extender” program no longer works on Windows 7 Media Center.

The solution is an application that comes with Windows 7 called “"c:\windows\ehome\WTVconverter.exe”.  This can be conveniently accessed in file explorer by clicking the right mouse button where you will be given an option to change a wtv file to dvr-ms format.

After following a few leads, I found this WTV Watcher.  This program watches for wtv recordings, then converts them automatically to dvr-ms.

Why would you do this?

So you can run Lifextender of course!

LifeExtender won’t be reinstalled in our household yet however, as it got a bad reputation for clipping the end of some programs and leaving all the Optus commercials……So there you go.

UPDATE:  I’ve just noticed in my travels a reference to a more up to date ad removal and tv program shrinking program called MCEBuddy.  Will let you know more soon.

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