Wide World of Women

Oh my god, I am soooo hoping someone can help me! I have been using a Windows MEdia Center PC to record my shows and than Frameshots to cap them. The trouble is for somereason now, I cant seem to scan through the show and have to physcially watch it the entire way through to cap it. I have tried everything even uninstalling the program to fix it but no go.

Here is what I am wondering. What do you all use to capture images with your Windows XP Media Center PC's? Do you convert them to any other formats before cpaturing? If you do what program do you use? Also, what programs are you all using to capture the images?

I dont know why but all of the sudden now I cant even watch the DVR-MS Media Center Files on Windows MEdia Player 10. It plays the shows as a song....very weird. I have no idea how to fix it or what is wrong.

Thanks for any help guys and keep up the great work, this is a killer site!

John

These will probably get moved the Tech Support forum, but regardless...

I have seen the issue you are dealing with. I cannot say for certainty, but I suspect it has to do with the encoding method. The way digital video is recorded is every so often a "key frame" is recorded, then for a specified number of frames, only the differences between the key frame and the current frame are recorded. This allows good compression since in most cases, only one part of the scene is changing.

If you jump into the middle of a file, you have to wait until a key frame comes up so the player can paint the whole screen, then start drawing the differences. I suspect codecs are getting very intricate nowadays, but nothing beats classic MPEG format. It has decent compression and very good seekability. Stay away from WMV unless you are looking to archive the video and need much heavier compression. I capture at 2Mbit/sec bitrate. I've considered upping it, but would want to speed test my hard drive first.

Hope that helps. And hey, I might be completely wrong but at least I sound like I know what I'm talking about.

PS, it got moved to tech support while I was composing...

Do you have this kind of screen while playing back in The Media Center and what year is your MC ?

http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIn ... a=31868327

I don't play mine on the media Player 10. I just play with the MC. The one in the pics in epson. I don't know what all you have or how your MC is set up. If you cannot see a picture, you might have to download a patch and put a new copy of your DVD player back on your computer. If thaty is the case, call the techs from the make of your computer, they will help.

If you have a Dell, the download I had to use is R86017.EXE. Just go to www.dell.com and type it in search. Down load it, run it. Do not restart your computer, but put in your Cyberlink Power DVD, install that then restart your computer. But Iwould call Dell first to make sure that is the one you need

As far as caps, I just use screen captures, there are all sorts out there, You just got to find what works best for you. They have them at www.download.com and as far the format, I cap them to BMP. I adobe photoshop elements 3, you can run them through the batch and do many at one time to resize or do whatever you need to do even change the formats. There are others. Just go to www.download.com and try the trails they have and see what you like.


This is very good, Corel Painter IX it gets good screen shots and helps to fix up pics if they need fixing. Down load the free trail, I'm sure you will like it. It just takes a little time to set it up to how you want it to work

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite? ... orel3/Home

I think if you don't use your media player 10, but use your media center, you will have better luck, When you get your pics when using a screen capture, make sure you have it set on the current screen

thank you for the responses! My MEdia Center is an HP I bought only about 2 weeks ago. But the trouble is I cant find any program that will allow me to go through play the DVR-MS files to cap. I am going to give that Corel a try and see if it allows me to play the files. thanks again for taking the time to post that!

does your media center have these screens ? if so, all you need is a screen capture. There should be no need to play it anywhere else. The media center in so many words is a DVD player and a TV.

With a screen capture, you set it to whatever hot key you pick or use the default. As fast as you hit that key, that is a new pic. But you have got to adjust it to where you send your pics, what formats (on some) and so on. It will take a little time and fooling around with til you get it to work as you what it to

I'll see if I can play mine on the DVD players that I have later tonight. I believe most DVD players for computers now allow you to grab pics

http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIn ... &vt=vp&pw=

These pics came off a screen capture and I set the media centers screen size to 640 kbs, not full screen. The way to do that is to hit the middle box up on the right hand side of the screen. That will make your media center screen smaller. On the bottom right hand side you will see blue dots, put your pionter on them, click the mouse and move it to the size you want

Here's link to a site that has some DVR-MS utilities, including one two convert the DVR to WMV (which then you could use anything to play it)

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/downloads.aspx

This is an MSDN technical article on the DVR format and has a download to create a standalone DVR player. I just checked the download and it does have the binaries that you can run to perform the functions described in the article. You will probably need to download the .NET framework (v 1.1) to run any of these.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnxpmce/html/dvr-ms.asp

rbaggio, I was looking around with mine. I think I know what you might be doing wrong, then again I might be wrong.

When you go to watch a recorded show, do you go to MY TV on the start up menu on the media center and click on the remote icon or do you go the the files that has your recorded shows. On that one, my recorded shows goes to the SHARED DOCUMENTS in the screen when I hit MY COMPUTER.

When I play them from the SHARED DOCUMENTS, it plays them on my media player 10. When I play them from the RECORDED incon that is on the Media Center (it has icon pic of a remote) It plays them in with the Media Center. This is where I get my pics from, not the media player 10 and where you want to be

Do this, click the REMOTE icon in the Media Center start up menu. That will show you all the shows that you still have recored on you computer. (once you delete them, they will not show up there anymore) Click on the show you wish to see. If that takes you to your media player 10. Call HP and see if they can help you, cus it should be playing with the Media Center instead

When you uninstalled it, then put it back on, something might have been left off. And did you get a remote with yours ? With the remote you can FF, pause, slow it down, go back and so on. You can also do all that with the M.C. screen using the mouse and controls on the bottom of the screen

see the trouble is the media center pc is what I use as a "server" in my house. It hosts all my files that I use my desk PC, laptop and when I am away connecting remotely. What is happening is I record a program on the MCPC and than try to click the file on my other PC's to watch it to cap it. Thats what is not working. I dont knwo what happened but everything was working fine until Thursday....I did not do any updates manually, I just was getting ready to cap Primer Impacto and than WHAM it crashed.

I guess I could use the Media Center to cap it just would be a little difficult as I would have to use myremote software to play the file and it is choppy, there is no monitor attached. I usually take my recorded shows and burn them to DVD or I watch them remotely on my i-730.

I downloaded NERO last night as a trial and that played my DVR-MS files like a champ....no troubles. The reason I dont want to use any convertors (like a DVR-MS to WMV) is that I have tried them and I lose a TON on the quality....

Thank you all for helping me with this, I cant tell you how great this site is....oh my god it is like Christmas Day every time I log in =)


John

Ok guys I found the solution.... and I wanted to post it here for the future if anyone ever is having the same issues as me.

I downloaded NERO Vision Express, the latest version, and it not only can play all my DVR-MS files without any trouble but it also has a built in Screen Capture utility that takes crystal clear shots. So there is my solution!

I need to catch up on some Univision programs and I will post the results so you all can see them!

Thanks again all for all of your help!

holy crap! Man those came out sooooo clear. I still can't believe it. Check them out, and tell me what you all think.

http://wideworldofwomen.net/WWW/viewtopic.php?t=17603