Twonky Forum

I did a search and seen several mentions of NO .wtv support.. I was wondering if this is still true? I love the speed of twonky for my music, i just hate running a seperate windows media center for my tv, DVR, and Ripped movies. I would like for my WMP clients to have everything playable from my twonky server. I do like WMC for the video tidbits and will still use it, but i would also like to play on WMP's that are in different rooms of my home without needing an extender (xbox 360).

Hope i made sense, i think i confused myself a bit in that post, kinda tired..

Thanks all.

pir8radio wrote:I did a search and seen several mentions of NO .wtv support.. I was wondering if this is still true? I love the speed of twonky for my music, i just hate running a seperate windows media center for my tv, DVR, and Ripped movies. I would like for my WMP clients to have everything playable from my twonky server. I do like WMC for the video tidbits and will still use it, but i would also like to play on WMP's that are in different rooms of my home without needing an extender (xbox 360).

Hope i made sense, i think i confused myself a bit in that post, kinda tired..

Thanks all.

Just keep whipping that dead horse. Its unlikely to ever happen. WTV is a proprietary Microsoft format. If you search the web, most people convert WTV files to a more generally supported format. I believe there are programs that will do this (semi-) automatically but have never tried them.

Since you have .wtv files I assume you using windows 7

If so, for the time being do one of the following

Either right click, on a .wtv file and select "Convert to .dvr-ms Format"
which would produce a file format twonky can stream

or

say for ex: you wanted to convert a whole folder, without all of that right clicking
You could create a batch file to do it for you with something like this in it

C:\WINDOWS\EHOME\WTVCONVERTER "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\*.WTV" /SHOWUI

Note: obviously this will double the amount of space needed, as both files will exist

The question is how important is it for you to stream wtv files through twonky
and lets say it could, what devices do you use that are going to be able to play them natively,
other than windows based products?

Otherwise we would now be talking transcodeing
By doing something like the following
(note this would also strip all of the things that make .wtv .dvr-ms containers what they are)

ffmpeg -i oldfile.wtv -vcodec copy -acodec copy newfile.mpg

I decided to put this to the test

I dont have a tv tuner, but I do have windows 7
So I download a sample .wtv file from here
http://w14.easy-share.com/1701207119.html

I did the right click thing on it and converted it to a .dvr-ms
I was able to play the file from within media center, media player was odd at best
I copied this .dvr-ms file to the twonky server
and it indeed is now being seen by the clients on my network
which gets back to what clients have the ability to play this file

The xbox doesnt see it, doesnt support it
The PS3 see's it doesnt support it

That leaves with other devices, which one's do, not a clue other than extenders maybe

So for me the best choice would be to actually put the .wtv or .dvr-ms into a different container
(If you do this youll lose all the meta data to the movie info actor etc)
But it would now play on anything that supports mpeg natively

I used a special version of ffmpeg, that does one and only one thing muxing, no encodeing
You can find info on it here

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=152419

and you can download it here

http://sourceforge.net/projects/direct2 ... 0Programs/

So what i do to do the magic is this

ffmpeg -i movie.wtv -vcodec copy -acodec copy movie.mpg

This does NOT re-encode it just remuxes it into an mpg container

I add this movie.mpg file to the twonky server
and now i can watch the file on a lot more devices than I could before
all with zero loss in quality

Now I know this isnt a substute for native WTv support, but it is a solution
If Twonky did have support the WTV container, What would you then further ask twonky to then do?
As for me the problem is bigger then just support for a file format

I have been using VideoRedo for years now, and their H264 version 4 supports non-destructive editing of WTV and DVR-MS the same way they have always done with MPEG-2 files.
http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/showt ... hp?t=24328

You can even now encode to various profiles, such as H.264 WTV, which one could argue being the same quality at half the size of the MPEG-2 WTV. Unfortunately, Media Center is the only thing to really handle those. You can choose a different profile like H.264 *.MP4 files, along with their VAP utility for nightly automated encoding or something. I just realized that MP4 files on Win7 let you modify metadata using Explorer just like WMV and the WTV/DVR-MS files, so I'm sure with some scripting you could have a file that most everything reads (MP4) and keeps the metadata from the TV recording.

I should add that VideoRedo will only read/write the WTV files when run on WIndows 7 (or perhaps with the Vista + TV Pack installed), and can't open the WTV files on WHS (Win2003 Server, which means not on XP either).

After finally getting my Ceton quad-cablecard tuner a few months back, I don't know how I managed with just 2 tuners. It along with MediaCenter and automated commercial skip add-in rocks. I'm hoping to get Twonky or something to help with the occasional times when I'm out of the office and want to stream audio and tv shows some day (remote potato) to my WP7 device.