The Zune players look nice and I wish I had chance to pick one up while I was at CES, one thing I did notice was that they can’t play recorded TV files from Media Center. Over at The wow blog on the hive there is a nice post on how to get Recorded TV on to a Zune. Basically it involves converting the file with Windows Movie Maker (Windows Vista only). I am sure there could be a more automated way of doing it with Windows Media Encoder but this is a nice simple way.

It does beg the question as to why Zune can’t play dvr-ms files?

Windows Media Center in Windows Vista records TV shows in .dvr-ms files. What you can do is take those TV shows from Windows Media Center and import them into Windows Movie Maker. Drag that imported TV show into the "Timeline" or "Storyboard" section (usually on the bottom of Windows Movie Maker) and go to "File" and "Publish Movie…". Go through the Wizard until it gets to the screen where it allows you to choose the settings for the video you are publishing. Choose "More Settings" and click the drop down menu. Choose Windows Media Portable Device and hit ok. For a TV show that is 1 hour, it may take some time to publish. Half hour shows will be faster. After the movie has been published, you can go into the Zune Player and find that published movie file and sync it up with your Zune. The Zune Player will "convert" the movie for the Zune.

The Wow blog

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