andy vt's tools & blog

I've been pulling my hair out for weeks trying to work around the Zune's inability to transcode ATSC recordings.  Right now I'm using MCEBuddy to transcode everything to mp4 so that it will sync up, but that's getting dumped into the general "All Videos" folder and without metadata it's a mess.  ZuneTVWatcher converts the files with no audio on ATSC recordings, so no dice there either.

I also tried using DTB for the conversion, but gave up after several days of not getting conversions to happen (with no log files).

That's all history...  I had a new idea today that I'd like to try out, but I'm hoping you can save me some time and hair-pulling by letting me know if this is something I can even accomplish.

Goal:  Create a shadow "Recorded TV" folder that is in sync with the real "Recorded TV folder", but everything that is in that folder has been converted to standard definition.  Then the zune software can read it in, apply metadata, transcode, and store it nicely.

Any tips on how to accomplish this (if it's even possible)?  Thanks in advance.

dtb can't convert atsc to wmv, at least not with the standard profiles.  the problem with atsc isn't the quality of the video, but the AC3/multi-channel audio.  the wm asf writer won't connect to PCM audio that uses the WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE structure even though the wmwriter supports it.

You should be able to get what you're looking for by using converting to mpeg then using wmencoder to convert to wmv.  all of this can be automated using DTB.

The process is explained here.  Don't be mislead by the title, the goal is the same; but in your case you want to use a different profile targeted to the zune. 

I am trying to simplify this process making it more supportable and requiring less configuration, but I've been having trouble getting the different options working.  currently I'm trying to create a new wm asf writer filter, but my lack of knowledge in this area is making progress slow.

re. creating a SD version of the ATSC content, I'm not sure the problem is different here as you'd have to find a way to convert ac3 audio to mpg audio before transcoding to wmv.
 

babgvant:

re. creating a SD version of the ATSC content, I'm not sure the problem is different here as you'd have to find a way to convert ac3 audio to mpg audio before transcoding to wmv.
 

 Yes, basically I want to take a DVR-MS with HD MPEG2 video and AC3 audio and convert it to a DVR-MS with MPEG2 video and MPEG audio, while maintaining the metadata.  If I do that, the Zune software will take care of the WMV conversion for me.

Is that doable?

pnear:

 Yes, basically I want to take a DVR-MS with HD MPEG2 video and AC3 audio and convert it to a DVR-MS with MPEG2 video and MPEG audio, while maintaining the metadata.  If I do that, the Zune software will take care of the WMV conversion for me.

Is that doable?

it's certainly doable. but there's nothing OOTB.  if you can program it should be possible to build the graph below to convert the file.  There could be some blocking issues, like I don't know that MS publishes the interface for configuring their MPEG audio encoder, but I could be wrong. 

Otherwise you can subsititute MS encoder with ATI's (part of their AVIVO package) which exposes it's config in the property pages so you'd probably just have to write the code to configure the SBE sink. 

I think that figuring out ATSC DVR-MS -> WMV conversion is a better approach though.  More folks would benefit from the solution; Zune/PPC/PMC and those who want to archive ATSC content with multi-channel audio. 

The dvr-ms to dvr-ms solution is over my head it would appear.  I would love to get the WMV conversion working, but like many others have posted it just fails and writes nothing to the logs. 

A useful WMV conversion would be something like is done by ZuneTVWatcher, where it writes the metadata from the dvr-ms into the WMV and sets it as a TV content type.  That project has been abandoned right now by the author, but the concept is sound.

dtb works the same way when it converts to wmv (metadata and TV guids), but it's limited by the available tools so multi-channel audio doesn't work. 

i'm trying to work around this limitation, but the documentation and samples are pretty light so it's been slow going. 

It's too bad I'm not an MVP because the source for the WM ASF Writer is available; with that it would be a relatively easy process to create a new writer that supported multi-channel audio.