I thought I would warn users of the downside of having Freeview HD in Windows Media Center. First I have to say there is no way I would switch back to standard Freeview in Media Center but the change to DVB-T2 from DVB-T has brought one major disadvantage for me. For some time I have used MCE Buddy and other Media Center video conversion tools, I love the way MCE Buddy can watch a folder and automatically convert the videos to MP4 format for my iPad, this worked great until I upgraded to the Blackgold BGT3620 Freeview HD Card. Freeview HD uses DVB-T2 rather than the older DVB-T and uses H.264 as it’s video codec, most of the Media Center video conversion tools start by converting the video from WTV format to the older DVR-MS format but the old DVR-MS format does not support H.264 so the conversion fails.
All the recordings done with card are encoded with H.264 regardless whether they are HD recordings or not so it looks like none of the 3rd party apps that rely on the DVR-MS format will work anymore. This is also a problem with recorded TV in New Zealand which is also encoded with H.264
Hopefully there are some tools that will work with the H.264 files so if you have any recommendations let me know.
0 thoughts on “Freeview HD in Windows Media Center Breaks Conversion Tools”
You sure about this Ian? SD recordings should still be in mpeg2 as that is how they are broadcast. Otherwise it would imply that the card is on-the-fly converting mpeg2 to h.264 which just doesn’t make sense. Why would it do this?
Apparantly the latest version of DVR-MS Toolbox can convert h.264 wtv files to mkv.
Cannot test any of this myself as Freeview HD is still a far off dream down here…
Hi Ian, You could look at VideoRedo. I use this frame-copying tool to take ‘segments’ out of FreeSat WTV files (H264) and it now has various recoding options for lower resolutions. Brian.
I got my Black Gold card just before Christmas and had this problem too. I found that Microsoft’s expression encoder4 (free version) can convert the .wtv files to .wmv. On my i5 this takes about 3 times real time.
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You sure about this Ian? SD recordings should still be in mpeg2 as that is how they are broadcast. Otherwise it would imply that the card is on-the-fly converting mpeg2 to h.264 which just doesn’t make sense. Why would it do this?
Apparantly the latest version of DVR-MS Toolbox can convert h.264 wtv files to mkv.
Cannot test any of this myself as Freeview HD is still a far off dream down here…
I tested BBC 2, BBC4, Virgin which are SD and they would not work
Hi Ian, You could look at VideoRedo. I use this frame-copying tool to take ‘segments’ out of FreeSat WTV files (H264) and it now has various recoding options for lower resolutions. Brian.
I got my Black Gold card just before Christmas and had this problem too. I found that Microsoft’s expression encoder4 (free version) can convert the .wtv files to .wmv. On my i5 this takes about 3 times real time.
Hopefully the new MCEBuddy 2.0 Betas will go well.
http://www.mcebuddy.com/WhatsNew/Announcements.aspx