Sync Media Center Recorded TV to Your Zune

info@santry.com — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

Imagine my surprise when I hooked up my Zune to my Media Center PC only to learn that the Zune will not sync my recorded TV. This was upsetting, my guess is since we're in between Vista and XP, once Vista is launched we'll be able to sync with the Vista Media Center.

All was not lost for me however. I also happen to have an XP Media Center PC (with two TV cards), which we use to connect to other TVs via Extenders. Since my current Extenders will not work on Vista, I have to keep my Media Center running XP.

After searching the web, I found dCut which is free application that will transcode dvr-ms files over to smaller PPC friendly wmv files. Basically you need to use the rules that come with the application, it's hard to find comprehensive documentation, but all you have to do is configure a rule to handle all ".dvr-ms" as the string to look for the in the file and then place the converted file into a directory.

dCut will automatically convert all new recordings and place them into this folder. Then in the Zune software all you have to do as add the folder as a watched folder for your library and automatically it will be added. Since Media Center names the files after the TV show name, I then set an auto playlist up in Zune to sync any shows with the filenames that begin with the shows that I want to sync.

Once all this is set up, it's just a matter of connecting my Zune to my PC and automatically my most recent recordings are there. It takes a while to set it all up, but once it's done you don't need to worry about it anymore. Hopefully once Vista is released to the world we'll be able to sync to our Vista Media Centers automatically.

Download dCut...

UPDATE: If you're looking for a solution for sync'ing on Vista with your Zune, I found one.