Can MCEBuddy encode MPEG-4 / h.264 video into a valid WTV container including the correct metadata needed to properly function as a WMC file served from the “Recorded TV” folder?
[added modified question in response to comments]
I haven’t paid for MCEBuddy yet, I’d like to know if it can do what I need first. I’d like to monitor my RecordedTV folder and replace the original mpeg2 WTV files with re-encoded h.264 WTV files. Commercial removal would be nice, but isn’t required.
Background: I pay for cable TV, and I use a HDHR Connect with CableCard as my tuner. I have a Windows Media Center computer as a back end to record TV shows. I use ServerWMC to serve up live and recorded shows to RaspberryPi’s running Kodi.
My setup has been working great for several years, but my wife just picked up an android tablet that doesn’t like mpeg2 streams. I want to get Kodi running smoothly on the tablet. The tablet plays h.264 streams flawlessly, but mpeg2 is software decoded and the video can’t keep up. The tablet supports hardware mpeg2/h.264/HEVC/VC-1/VP8/JPEG video decoding, but I don’t think the vendor paid for the mpeg2 license. I’ve tried to ask the vendor, Lenovo, but no response yet.
Since the tablet and RPI’s play h.264 streams well, I’d like to convert my mpeg2 WTV recorded shows to h.264 recorded shows and leave them inthe same location on the WMC computer.
Until a bit over a year ago I was using two HDHR Extend tuners that streamed in h.264, but the cable company switched to 100% encrypted channels. I replaced the two HDHR Extends with one HDHR Connect & CableCard decryption, but the connect only streams the cable company’s mpeg2 streams without compression.
Sorry if the write-up is long. Any help would be appreciated.
They’re not encrypted. The tuner uses a CableCard to decrypt the streams.
MCEBuddy works to convert the WTV mpeg2 files to h.264 encoded MP4/MKV files. If I rename the files to .WTV and overwrite the original in the RecordedTV folder they’re not recognized as TV recordings.
The files play if posted into a “TV Shows” folder, but I want the system to be seamless for my wife: the way to access recorded shows on our TVs using Kodi on RPIs being the same as to access recorded shows on the tablet using Kodi.
MP4 and WTV are different formats and not interchangeable. If you need a
WTV file then select a WTV profile in the conversion task. If you want both
MP4 and WTV converted file then create 2 conversion tasks, one with a MP4
profile and other with a WTV profile.
I know from the previous HDHR Extend tuner that the tuner recorded and streamed compressed h.264 video. My assumption was that WTV is a container file that could have any number of codecs used within, like AVI. Looking into it Wikipedia says…
“Multiple data streams (audio and video) are wrapped in a container with the file extension WTV. Video is encoded using the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard and audio using MPEG-1 Layer II or Dolby Digital AC-3 (ATSC A/52).”
…then adds…
“The format extends these standards by including metadata about the content and digital rights management.”
My modified question now is: Can MCEBuddy encode MPEG-4 / h.264 video into a valid WTV container including the correct metadata needed to properly function as a WMC file served from the “Recorded TV” folder?
I hadn’t known about the metadata and digital rights headers, so I assumed the h.264 video could be renamed, similar to the way .vob files can be renamed and used as .mpg files.
I think the known issue is that not all extenders can play h.264 encoded WTV videos. I have the opposite problem, extenders that can’t play mpeg-2 encoded WTV videos.