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Although I already have a Scientific Atlantic’s Explorer 8000HD DVR I thought I would want the capability to to save some of the things I record on DVD. So I purchased a Dell Dimension 5500 with Microsoft Windows Media Center on it. After configuring the tuner card that came with it, which was very buggy. I think I had to reboot the computer several times because I kept on getting the error “the tv card is being used by another application” well yeah the media center is using it. I finally got it all hooked up and started watching tv instead of working. It is very distracting working on your computer with a small tv window in the corner on your 21in widescreen (1680×1050) display.

Now it was time to use this machine for what I bought it for so I recorded something on standard cable. It was a 2 hour movie on cable. I then tried to save to dvd. I got an error saying there wasn’t enough room on the dvd. I checked the file size and it was 6.50 GB for 2 hours of tv, not even in HD. One of the reason it wasn’t in HD is because WMC doesn’t support it well it technically supports HD but the cable company has to install a smart card to decode the HD channels they are broadcasting. In some areas the local (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) channels are broadcasted in HD but you have to have a HD tuner and I fairly certain dell doesn’t sale or they didn’t at the time any HD tv cards. Anyway since I couldn’t fit the 2 hour show on a dvd I started looking around to see what the deal was, if I was trying save the wrong file or something. It turns out that WMC saves recorded tv in its own drv-ms file format, which seems to have a very bad compression ratio. Own meaing Microsoft’s own file format. To actually get the data WMC saves into a format that can fit onto a dvd and play in your home dvd player you have to use some third party software. Here is a link I found discussing that. If it were not for the capability to this. Then next time I will do this.