Giving DVRMS Toolbox a go

[impact]

Well after recent discussions on the dvr conversion / compression stuff - I thought Id give the DVRToolbox a go...

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/commun...ssageID=113435

DVRMSToolbox is a set of tools to perform actions on DVRMS files. The actions can be run against a single file (DVRMStoMPEG.exe) or against a directory (DVRMSToolbox.exe) using "Processing Conditions", or meta data based rules that you create. Both of these tools are command line applications so it's easy to create scheduled tasks that process your recorded tv while you sleep, or if you are a more visual person a there is also a GUI that will run the applications.

A set of "Profiles", or configured set of actions, is included in the installation package.
These include:
- Convert DVR-MS to MPEG
- Convert DVR-MS to MPEG w/o commercials
- Convert DVR-MS to WMV
- Cut commercials out of a DVR-MS file and output DVR-MS
- Cut commercials out of DVR-MS, output DVR-MS and DVR-MS with commercials
- Cut out commercials, convert to WMV
- Fix the MCE Slider (used to make the duration slider in MCE reflect the actual duration in edited files)
- Remove commercial, output DVR-MS, move to Recorded TV
- Do Nothing

So I installed it - setup went in painlessly - no errors - looking good...

Next, lets try something hard - I selected SuperNanny from monday night - and using the toolbox I selected to convert it to WMV and remove ads... Thought this would be fun!!!!

Off it went... took around 45 mins (Its a 70 minute recording - has paddig on both sides - end of temptation at the start and something else at the end of the show...

The process did not finish - and found in the log the following error:

Begin conversion of C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Temp\sn.dvr-ms to D:\sn.wmv
COM object with CLSID {3EBC8DFD-87ED-4E41-B02A-ADC97C0F8FC1} is either not valid or not registered.

Bummer... went looking around and found some temporary files that it was working on... It appears that the conversion was working well - I got a temporary dvrms file of around 15 mins - excellent quality - but can not say what the eventual file size would be...

And YES it cut the ads out perfectly... This file has the end of temptation - it cut out the ch9 promo, news, ads, and started right on for Supernanny !!! Next Ad break was also cut out perfectly !!! But that is all I have...

Looks like promise here - very interesting - looks like a lot of reading to try and find out why I got this error!!!!

An older thread at tgb might give me some clues at http://www.thegreenbutton.com/commun...ssageID=100797

Oh it was a dvb-t file if your interested in knowing!!!!

So if anyone else is trying / gets a similar error / works out a solution - yell out in this thread - could be a great free tool here!

[arkay]

Same here. Seems the CLSID missing object is related to the WMV encoding. I searched the registry for a key containing it and it isn't there. Just have to find out what it relates to. Probably some missing filter.

Am running a remove commercials and convert to mpg at the moment. That in itself will be worth it's weight in gold cause I can use mencode from there to convert to divx.

Interesting so far...

Cheers,
Arkay.

[impact]

Good to see its not just my machine...

Post the results here for the mpg conversion - might get to play with it later tonight.... but am interested...

And if the mencode bit works to goto divx - better give us some details on what to do / how / where to get the software etc... (never heard of mencode....) - but I did read on the tgb thread someone was developing the divx package for this - now that would be great...

I'll go do the post over at tgb for help in getting this com module fixed / registered !?

[Matt]

Sounds great guys!!

Please keep up the information flow as I'm really interested in this one!

Cheers

Matt.

[impact]

Posted the query and log file on tgb.... the post before me was someone else in Australia by the looks of it - he appears to have gotten further, as he is enquiring about the macro stuff...

Anyway - lets see what happens overnight?

[arkay]

Ok.. 1 step further. The CLSID that you're missing belongs to dcut!!
Install dcut and it won't throw that exception anymore. Apparently the wmv conversion relies on something in dcut....

Unfortunate as the dcut wmv conversion never worked for me either...

From what I can tell though it still doesn't work. Still playing so we'll see what I can find.

Cheers,
Arkay.

[impact]

Well that sucks... if it relies on dcut and dcut dont work for us in aus land with dvb-t whats the chance of it working now....

Suppose I could give it a try... but.....

[arkay]

Still it has potential. I've tried a few now and sometimes the conversion to mpeg with ad removal is lightning fast and other times pig slow or doesn't start at all... Ad removal seems pretty good though.

As for reliability it's up there with any MS based product

-Arkay.

[impact]

I am amazed that the ad removal stuff appears to work !!! I agree about the reliability of it all - but I konda like this... going to persevere a bit with this I think !

[arkay]

I really like the fact that you can call it from the command line Interesting tidbit in the help file too about a tool that will render any graph saved from graphedit allowing you to tell it which input/output filenames etc to use. I can see a million uses for that

-Arkay.

[impact]

Solution hopefully overnight at tgb... The main man babqvant has posted

my bad...

forgot to make the dvr2wmv.dll register itself in the install...