Tell Me More About My WTV File

[JohnJ9]

I want to know if I can tell more about the contents of a WTV file than one can get from the Win8 properties. At last check, MediaInfo doesn't understand WTV files entirely, and can't suss out what audio streams are within the file, and I don't know how much else it either just guesses at or doesn't quite discover or get right. I'd like to know whether a WTV file contains 720p or 1080i/p, whether there is 5 channel in it, etc. I'm very curious for a few reasons, which require a bit of rambling.

I have a bunch of stuff that I record off in order to view later - later in the year, because I get very busy during the spring and summer. I pull some things off to use as teaching aids as well. I went down the WMC/HTPC route because a) my DVR seems to die a couple times a year (they seem to want to do this, and I suspect it's disk drives), and b) my current approach was to play back through a Hauppauge 1212 and pull them in, then go through and convert them with Handbrake into something I can watch later on over an ATV3. Just my route, and one that works, and I know there are a lot of different ways to do it, but this worked for me. The aggravation step was having to unplug the HDMI from the DVR, then play back the show in realtime to capture it. The rest of it was pretty easy, and the computer just does the work while I'm sleeping or working. I've had some stuff that I've captured mainly for teaching purposes, and I wanted to send some of it to a friend remotely to watch together and then comment. In order to make something that moves over the wire more efficiently, I'd use Handbrake to make an ATV2 setting copy of the file, which would produce a 720p version, in effect. About half the size, uploads and downloads more quickly, life is good.

One of the side effects of doing it this way was that you end up capturing a 1080i stream from the Hauppauge - which I thought was good! - and then converting it out as though that were the source stream. I recently bought a Ceton ETH6, however, and first tried things out running WMC on a Win7 machine. Much to my surprise, the channel I do a lot of the recording from turns out that it only sends out a 720p signal! I had no idea! And, because my recording was going through the Hauppauge, I thought what I had was 1080p when in fact the DVR was upscaling for me without really saying so. Turns out I could have been saving some time, CPU, and disk space all along!

I'd love a way to figure out what's inside a WTV file so that I don't do foolish things like this in the future. I think I just stumbled upon this information on the Win7 machine, but once I had things working I purchased a Win8 machine to do the actual recording (and let my son have his machine back without messing me up!). I find there is not much data available on the Win8 properties, and would love to find a way to get MediaInfo-like information about the files before post-processing them.

[choliscott]

VideoRedo (which does cost) has something like:

File: Name : D:\Recorded TV\Good Luck Charlie.Dance Off.677.wtv
Size : 2.692 GB
Duration : 00:29:31.19
Mux type : WTV
Video: Encoding : MPEG2
VideoStreamID : x275
Frame rate : 59.94 fps
Encoding size : 1280 x 720
Aspect ratio : 16:9
Header bit rate : 38.810 Mbps
VBV buffer : 1194 KBytes
Profile : Main@High
Progressive : Progressive Only
Chroma : 4:2:0
Bit rate : 11.305 Mbps
Captioning : EIA 608/708
Field order : Progressive
Audio Stream: 1 (Primary) Codec : AC3
Channels : 5.1
Language : eng
PID : x274
PES Stream Id : xBD
Bit rate : 384 Kbps
Sampling rate : 48000
Sample size : 16 bits