1. Digital Video Recorder (DVR) Capabilities

We ended Part 1 of our two-episode series on Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 with a discussion about how to use MCE's built-in electronic program guide (EPG) to pre-program TV broadcast recordings. We now explain in Part 2 how MCE helps you organize and manage what you record.

Recorded programs also pick up corresponding information listings from the EPG database.

Digital video recordings are written to the Media Center PC's hard disk in a proprietary Microsoft file format called DVR-MS (DVR represents digital video recording and MS stands for Microsoft). This package lets Microsoft use MPEG-2 (Motion Photographer's Experts Group, format 2) and the company's Stream Buffer Engine (introduced with Service Pack 1, SP1, for Windows XP). The Stream Buffer Engine allows applications to search within a data stream without having to pause or halt playback, so that the stream can continue uninterrupted. This technology enables seamless transitions between live and recorded streams of data (such as when you switch from a live to a recorded feed after pausing TV playback, for example). The SBE also supports standard MPEG-2 and video formats output by most digital camcorders.

DVR-MS data also includes enhanced metadata about media content, including:

It's also possible to incorporate DRM (Digital Rights Management) data and controls, so that when recording is allowed, it may only be played back on the machine upon which it was recorded.

For MCE, various recording quality settings may be used as well. The following table lists the approximate data delivery and encoding rates for each setting.

Because the composition of image and sound data depends on variable bit rates, actual data and encoding rates depend on the content that's streamed.

Recording quality is set during initial installation under "Installation - TV- Recorder" for MCE. Users can also indicate if and when older recordings may be overwritten by newer ones.