A few months ago I finally gave up on Windows Media Center and switched my home media setup to Kodi. After some early challenges I am now mostly happy with my new setup, and today I finally decided to migrate a large collection of old recorded TV from MCE to Kodi.
The first challenge was to convert the proprietary WTV files into more universally recognised TS files. There are a few tools out there that offer to do this, and in the past I had some success with MCEBuddy, but the newer versions are now “paid-for” and I always try to find free tools instead. There are lots of tools that will convert the file into a new format, but in the process most will convert the audio and video to different formats as well which takes a long time and reduces the quality.
I came across a recommendation for XMedia Recode which has a free version. I was able to use this to remux (without recompressing) most of my recorded TV files. A small number of files had audio that I was unable to “stream copy” and in these cases I decided to convert the audio as doing so is not very CPU intensive and hence doesn’t add very much time to the job, nor does it have much impact on the audio quality.
The next stage was to import the recordings into my TV backend DVBLink. There is no official way to do this, but fortunately, a DVBLink user called Jake has made a utility which did the trick.
“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”