Replay2DVRMS – Watching ReplayTV shows on Windows Media Center
Back in the early days of DVRs you had 2 choices; TiVO and ReplayTV. Well it’s no mystery which company won the DVR war but for those of us that made the technologically superior choice, we can still reap a few benefits from our “obsolete” device. 
My boss and I are ReplayTV users who are now using Windows Media Center for our main DVR. About 3-4 months ago we were dreaming of a way to somehow integrate the 2 technologies. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to leverage the Replay to record shows but then have those shows show up on the Media Center?
Yep. It sure would. And so Replay2DVRMS was born.
Replay2DVRMS is a tool used to convert ReplayTV files to the Windows Media Center file format (dvr-ms). This allows ReplayTV owners to continue to record TV shows on their device but access them through the Window Media Center interface. In order to accomplish this, users must download the TV shows off of their ReplayTV device using the tool DVArchive. DVArchive will create 2 files for each TV show it downloads; an mpeg file which contains the TV show and an XML file that contains all of the show’s metadata. Replay2DVRMS can then be used to convert the Replay show to a dvr-ms file and retain all of the original show’s metadata. The program usage is as follows:
Replay2DVRMS source [destination] [-d]
Where source is a ReplayTV mpeg file or a folder containing ReplayTV mpeg file(s) and destination is the name of the file or folder to output the dvr-ms file(s) to. If no destination is given the program will just write the output file to the source location. If the ReplayTV xml file is not found for the source file the program will still convert the file, but the show’s information will not be copied into the dvr-ms file. If the -d flag is specified the program will delete the source file after the conversion is complete.
Once the files are converted they can be copied to the Media Center’s “Recorded TV” folder which will allow the shows to display in the Recorded TV section of the Media Center interface.
This entire process can be automated to provide seamless integration between the ReplayTV and Windows Media Center. Automating the process can be accomplished in just a few steps:
- Use DVArchive’s scheduling functionality to automatically download shows each day to a folder on your machine (for instance: c:\ReplayShows\).
- Setup a scheduled job in windows to run the following command: Replay2DVRMS “c:\ReplayShows\” “c:\Recorded TV\”.
Assuming c:\Recorded TV\ was the folder your Media Center was storing its TV shows this would be all you needed to do to automatically see shows recorded on your Replay alongside those recorded on your Media Center.
HUGE thanks goes out to andy vt for his todvrms tool which is at the heart of Replay2DVRMS doing all of the hard work. He also graciously helped me work out a few kinks in getting the Replay files to convert correctly.
Please note: this program requires the .NET Framework version 3.5 be installed on your computer.
