Converting DVR-MS files to MP3 for ITunes – Simple process.

This solution is extremely simple and is designed to get DVR-MS files from your Media Center machine right into your IPod via ITunes. This description covers the production of *.mp3 files (for example for recorded radio programs under FreeView in the UK) but should work equally well for media center video material to be displayed on the video IPod.

1.     Obtain and install a copy of Digital Media Converter (DMC) from DeskShare (http://www.deskshare.com/dmc.aspx). We will need this to convert the DVR-MS file format to mp3.

2.     Copy the recorded DVR-MS files into a working directory for processing – for example “c:\Scratch”. We will call this WorkingDir.

3.     Select all the DVR-MS files in WorkingDir and drag and drop them into DMC. Configure DMC to convert to MP3 and your desired bitrate (I use 128k because I like to preserve the Freeview radio quality).

4.     Start the conversion which may take an hour or so. After this you will now have basic useable mp3 files of your recordings.

5.     Obtain and install a copy of Tag&Rename from SoftPointer (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm). We will need this to set the tags inside the mp3 files so that they display nicely on your IPod and in ITunes. (You can skip this step if you wish and simply drag and drop your mp3 files into your mp3 player locating and organising them simply by title, but ITunes works best if you have tags).

6.     Right-click your folder WorkingDir and select ‘Open in Tag&Rename’. All of your mp3 files are listed.

7.     Click the ‘Get tags from File Name’ tab. In the ‘File Mask’ control, enter the code “%3_%1_%d” (without quotes). This tells Tag&Rename to take various parts of the mp3 file title and treat them as the tags that you want. Click the ‘Preview’ button and you will see the effect. If you’re happy with the tags, click the ‘Write Tags’ button.

8.     Click the ‘Multi-File Tag Editor’ tab, click the ‘Genre’ and ‘Year’ tags and enter the tags that you require – for radio I enter ‘Spoken Word’ and ‘2007’ respectively. Click ‘Save Tags’.

9.     Click the ‘Get tags from File Name’ tab again. In the ‘File Mask’ control, enter the code “%2” (without quotes). This tells Tag&Rename to take the entire mp3 file name and use it as the title tag. Click the ‘Preview’ button and you will see the effect. If you’re happy with the tags, click the ‘Write Tags’ button. Close Tag&Rename.

10.  Your mp3 files are now ready. Move them to a ‘Spoken Word’ folder in your ITunes library, select all of these new files and drag them into ITunes to add them to your library. ‘Lo – they will show up and be fully searchable by tags, name etc. When you sync your IPod, they will also be easily findable there too.

Converting DVR-MS files to MP3 automatically using AutoDVRConvert.

This solution does not require any commercial programs, however it is more advanced than the method above and may depend on codecs that you have installed on your system. It uses a combination of the excellent AutoDVRConvert utility written by Heimiko  and the description ‘Converting DVB-T Radio to MP3’ by Mark Salloway in his blog at home.salloway.org.uk/mceblog/ where he describes how to use GraphEdit – a Microsoft DirectShow utility that visualises the chain of processing from a media source file through to a final output format. My solution here combines a GraphEdit script that you will write for your own machine together with the Lame mp3 encoder and AutoDVRConvert to automate the conversion process. A nice side-effect of this is that you can use this principle to create any conversion for which you have filters installed on your machine, for example dvr-ms to wma or divx. In addition, the mp3 solution that I document can be customised for bit rate etc.

This process is not straightforward but you should be able to follow the logic of creating the script. There is a subtlety too – AutoDVRConvert requires the GraphEdit script to be presented as an ‘*.XGR’ file – an output format that seems to have been dropped from the latest GraphEdit version 9, thus this description uses GraphEdit V8. I’m probably not supposed to do this, but I’ve bundled this required GraphEdit version in my collection of additional files in the zip described below. You may wonder why there are so many steps to this process. This is because there are many ways on various PC’s to render a media file depending on which codec’s you have installed, but it is not guaranteed exactly WHICH codec’s you will have – this depends on whether you have Winamp, PowerDVD, Nero etc etc. If you follow these steps below, you should quickly get a solution that works, though. By the way, it is important that you do have an MPEG2 decoder installed of some kind (i.e. a DVD player) otherwise your PC will not know how to handle dvr-ms files at all (they are effectively mpeg2 files with additional program information appended).

So, want mp3 output from your dvr-ms files and have a spare hour? Right then, here goes. 

  1. Download AutoDVRConvert V1.3 from http://home.quicknet.nl/qn/prive/antonbakker/AutoDVRconvert_1.3.zip
  2. Make a new folder AutoDVRConvert under C:\Program files and copy the above zip file contents to it.
  3. Download my zip file dvrms2mp3.zip and open it to copy its files to the AutoDVRConvert folder also.
  4. Execute the batch file REGISTER.BAT. This will register the lame mp3 encoder filter that will be used to encode the mp3 output.
  5. Chose a folder that you will use for your conversion work, for example ‘C:\scratch’. Place a sample dvr-ms file in that folder for testing.
  6. Run GraphEdit (GraphEdt.exe). Select ‘File’ ‘Render media file’ and navigate to your sample dvr-ms file. GraphEdit will create a filter chain automatically showing the audio and video routes that this file type will require to render the file on your machine.
  7. Delete all of the video paths leaving only the audio route (you only want mp3 output, after all).
  8. Using the ‘Graph’, ’Insert Filters’ option, look under ‘DirectShow filters’ and insert the filter ‘Lame MPEG Layer III audio encoder’.
  9. Identify the last filter in your audio chain – it may display as ‘Default DirectSound Device’. This is how the audio will be finally output when the file is processed. We will replace this with the Lame encoder. Do this by deleting the existing filter and then dragging the output pin of the MPEG2 digital audio decoder to the input pin of the Lame encoder that you inserted a minute ago.
  10. Now we must establish a file output mechanism. Use ‘Insert filters’ again to identify and insert the filter ‘DUMP’ from the DirectShow filters section. You will be prompted for a file name – select your sample dvr-ms file name but change the extension to ‘mp3’.
  11. Ensure that the Lame encoder is suitably configured. Right-click on it and open its properties, setting the bit rate to constant and 128k (or choose other properties to suit the encoding that you would like).
  12. Save the filter graph – call it ‘dvrms2mp3’ and save it in the AutoDVRConvert folder.
  13. Now test to see if the conversion process works. Click on the green ‘Play’ button in GraphEdit. If you navigate to your conversion folder you should see that a new MP3 file has been created and a small progress bar at the top of GraphEdit shows the conversion process is running. Depending on your PC speed it will take about 3 minutes to convert a 30 minute radio show of 40MB. Wait for the GraphEdit ‘play’ button to light up again. To check all is ok, try playing the resulting mp3 file. Now delete the mp3 file that you just made so that we can test driving this conversion from within AutoDVRConvert.
  14. AutoDVRConvert automates the conversion process by calling your filter graph but with various source file names as it finds them in the conversion folder. First though, you must present your filter graph to AutoDVRConvert in a form that it can use. Within GraphEdit, use ‘File’, ‘Save As XML’ to save your filter graph as ‘dvrms2mp3.xgr’ – this file is required by AutoDVRConvert. Exit GraphEdit.
  15. Run AutoDVRConvert.exe and then change its settings as follows. ‘Filter Graph To Use’ change to ‘dvrms2mp3’. ‘Input path’ and ‘Output Path’ change to the folder in which your media file exists (e.g. C:\scratch). ‘Input file extension should be ‘dvr-ms’ and output file extension should be ‘mp3’.  Click on ‘Apply Settings’ and then close AutoDVRConvert.
  16. Run AutoDVRConvert again. Check that your settings are saved ok. Click on ‘Start Auto converter’. All dvr-ms files in your media file folder will now be sequentially converted to their same-named mp3 versions. Progress is indicated on the AutoDVRConvert panel and also as a balloon hint on the tray icon.

 Enjoy!

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