When using Windows Media Center to record movies and shows you quickly fill up your hard drive. Windows Media Center saves the files in it's own format - DVR-MS - which is a format in DVD quality with metadata embedded.
One way to save space is to convert the files to a compressed format, eg. DivX. Of cource the quality drops, but you save space and you might find that DivX is good enough for you.
There are several tools that convert DVR-MS to DivX. I have tried many and found one that i like a lot. This tool is called Dr. DivX. The latest version is free! Download it from this site: http://labs.divx.com/DrDivX. You might have to install the latest DivX codex as well. Download the free version here.
When uoy have installed it, open the application, choose file from the top menu, click open and select a file, then click Encode. The prossess starts as a separate thread, so you can repeat the prosess to add more files to the queeue. If you click on the batch-buttom, you will se a list of files and the progress.
If you have recorded a movie or program with commercials, it is possible to remove them with a tool called DVRMSToolbox. This program also converts DVR-MS to different formats, eg MPEG og WMV. When I want to remove commercials I first use this tool and convert my recording to MPEG, then I use Dr. DivX to convert the MPEG-file til DivX. The tool is availible here: http://www.download.com/DVRMSToolbox/3000-11444_4-10444368.html. The tool should be quite straight forward. It's availible in a GUI verson and in a command line version (so you can script it).
Good luck!!
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Silverlight and ASP.NET
Lately I have looked into Silverlight - the new plugin from Microsoft. The 1.1 version is currently in beta, and it all looks very good!
If you create a Silverlight project in Visual Studio Orcas (the next version), you only get a html-page called testpage.html
The test page is intended as just what it says - its a test page. The Silverlight project is basically a variant on a class library project, just targetting Silverlight.
The way to work with websites and Silverlight is to add a web site or web application project to the solution. Right clicking on a directory in either of those will show an "Add Silverlight link" command. This will then add the outputs of the silverlight project to the site, and update them on builds etc. Consider it similar to add reference, but the output doesn't go in the bin directory as its run on the client, not the server.
If you drag a xaml file onto the design surface it will create a xaml asp.net control for you. This ends up with a "Click to activate" message when you run the page. Haven't figured out a good way to remove that yet...
One solution is to just write out the Silverlight control using javascript as used in the testpage.html. There is a demo of this method here: http://silverlight.net/QuickStarts/ViewSample.aspx?sref=SilverlightSampleControl/cs/Default.html, but it should be a better option...!
If you create a Silverlight project in Visual Studio Orcas (the next version), you only get a html-page called testpage.html
The test page is intended as just what it says - its a test page. The Silverlight project is basically a variant on a class library project, just targetting Silverlight.
The way to work with websites and Silverlight is to add a web site or web application project to the solution. Right clicking on a directory in either of those will show an "Add Silverlight link" command. This will then add the outputs of the silverlight project to the site, and update them on builds etc. Consider it similar to add reference, but the output doesn't go in the bin directory as its run on the client, not the server.
If you drag a xaml file onto the design surface it will create a xaml asp.net control for you. This ends up with a "Click to activate" message when you run the page. Haven't figured out a good way to remove that yet...
One solution is to just write out the Silverlight control using javascript as used in the testpage.html. There is a demo of this method here: http://silverlight.net/QuickStarts/ViewSample.aspx?sref=SilverlightSampleControl/cs/Default.html, but it should be a better option...!
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