How do I watch "wmc" tv recordings on smart tv?

Hey guys, noob here (please forgive my lack of vocabulary) with a question that's probably been beat to death, but I've searched for hours and can't seem to find the answer. For a couple of years, I've been using wmc with a hauppage tuner card receiving ota channels from an antenna only. I have a vizio led smart tv that is part of my home wireless network. I am able to access and play some video files on the vizio. I can even see the recorded tv folder and the recording titles that I've made in wmc. But I cant play the recorded tv files on the vizio. I don't have the "right click convert file" option to convert the .wtv files. Does my vizio not recognize the .wtv file and therefore wont play them? Is there someway that windows7 or wmc will convert the file? Is there something i'm doing wrong with the network and sharing requirements? I really want to be able to sit on the couch and watch a recorded grimm episode instead of in front of the pc.

Don't know anything about your Vizio TV's capabilities or inability to handle WTV files. Since these recorded programs are from an OTA ATI tuner card they are obviously copy-freely so it's not an encryption issue. Sounds like the Vizio just doesn't understand WTV.

But Windows Media Center is really designed to deliver content (both copy-freely and copy-protected) to a Windows Media Extender, which is a device on your home LAN that receives programs from the WMC HTPC over Ethernet (wired or wireless). The WMC Extender then delivers the distributed content to the connected HDTV via HDMI. So you would have an Extender at EACH location for an HDTV around your house, with up to five of them active simultaneously. Conceptually each Extender is like a "satellite client" (to your HTPC "server") in an equivalent cable company "whole home solution".

Anyway, in my own WMC HTPC/Extender setup (using a Ceton cablecard-enabled 4-tuner internal card plus 2-tuner Hauppauge HVR-2250 OTA ATSC card and roof antenna) I have three Linksys DMA2100 boxes around my house, serving my three HDTV's from my HTPC (which actually counts as a fourth HDTV as I can watch recorded TV programs on my second monitor while I work using my first monitor). In my own setup I have each DMA2100 connected "wired" to my router, for maximum reliability, as I went to the trouble and expense of "wiring my home" with CAT6 for precisely this type of possible use. But CAT5 (or better) is perfectly acceptable for delivering HDTV around your home from WMC.

The Linksys DMA2100 extenders are terrific (passive, 100% silent, small, low-power) and connect wired or wireless to the HTPC. They are no longer being made but they can still be bought. You can also consider a Ceton Echo, which is a currently manufactured extender, but I would have to say is still in its "product infancy" and is at least a bit less reliable than the DMA2100 boxes.

Either of these extenders will completely eliminate the need for your HDTV to know anything about WTV recordings. The HDTV's are fed from the extenders, which are fed from WMC itself. There is no need for any of this external equipment to understand WTV, as WMC is simply delivering the underlying HDTV content to the extender securely via Ethernet, which then delivers that identical HDTV content to the attached HDTV via secure HDMI.

dsperber, thanks for the reply and all of the info. Looks like that's what I need to do.

dsperber's advice would definitely be the easiest solution, since everything is designed to cooperate with each other out of the box. Alternatively, if you're on a budget, I suggest looking into a DVRMS Toolbox solution.

It's a freeware application that let's you script and customize your media files in almost any way imaginable. Most people use it to analyze their recorded .wtv files for commercials, and then add a plugin like ShowAnalyzer or comskip, to automatically skip commercials during playback. But it can also be used to automatically convert all .wtv files into another format, like dvr-ms (thus the program's name), or several other formats. If you find a video format that your Smart-TV can play, you could try figuring out a solution where DVRMSToolbox just automatically converts all your .wtv files into the format you know works.

It's not ideal, and you will likely run into issues in getting it to work right at first, but if you find a solution that worked, you should only have to worry about it once, and it could end up saving you hundreds of dollars.

foogama said:

Alternatively, if you're on a budget, I suggest looking into a DVRMS Toolbox solution.

It's a freeware application that let's you script and customize your media files in almost any way imaginable. Most people use it to analyze their recorded .wtv files for commercials, and then add a plugin like ShowAnalyzer or comskip, to automatically skip commercials during playback. But it can also be used to automatically convert all .wtv files into another format, like dvr-ms (thus the program's name), or several other formats.

Before I committed to replacing my multi-DVR (each independent of the other, before whole-house was available, one in each room) EXPENSIVE home arrangement from TWC/LA with a Ceton-based WMC-driven HTPC/extender "whole home" environment, I had a single-tuner ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI tuner card in my PC (for OTA ATSC only), and managed to happily survive using BeyondTV. The tuner card also had an external S-video input, which I fed from my Hughes HIRD-E45 DirectTV receiver (which was connected via firewire to an RCA VR911HF DVHS VCR that recorded/played D* digital satellite content directly, i.e. it was the tape-based forerunner of today's hard drive DVR's).

So with BeyondTV I could view/record/play OTA/ATSC directly from the ATI tuner card, and could also view/record/play from the external S-video input source, whatever the D* cluster of equipment was delivering (i.e. live or previously recorded on DVHS). But the "viewing" had to be done directly on the monitor of the PC (or whatever was supported from the video card of the PC... but not to remote TV's around the house as WMC supports via extenders).

BeyondTV has its own built-in commercial elimination software, named SmartSkip. It was remarkably reliable, dependable and accurate, and I used it all the time. Of course just-recorded content was not available for commercial-free viewing until the recording had been processed through the SmartSkip software, which was conceptually a software-play (at max CPU speed) and examination looking for commercial pods through the built-in algorithm and intelligence, and the creation of an XML "chapter marks" that then controlled playback (including colorizing the playback progress fuel-gauge to show program vs. commercials). Playback control through commercial pods could be automatically activated or manually controlled/overridden. Remarkably effective... aside from the necessity for delaying commercial-free playback until SmartSkip had an opportunity to scan the recording.

Note: SmartSkip takes essentially 100% CPU for an extended period depending on program recording duration, meaning lots of electricity used, heat-generation, CPU fan speed/noise to cool, etc.

Anyway, when planning my multi-tuner WMC transition from 1-tuner BeyondTV I investigated what options might be out there to accomplish the same type of [automated] commercial-free viewing. Naturally I stumbled across DVRMSToolbox and the ShowAnalyzer plugin, and how playback via WMC would then be controlled by what ShowAnalyzer had determined. I spent lots of time on this, including active participation on the relevant Forums, tweaking the "configuration setup script" for improved accuracy in determining commercials, talking with the developer, etc.. Of course there is the same necessity for delay before a recording can be viewed commercial-free as there was from BeyondTV and SmartSkip, as it also takes time for ShowAnalyzer to read the WTV recording and to analyze it for commercials. As it turns out I NEVER achieved the same type of commercial-skipping reliability and accuracy as SmartSkip produced, although ShowAnalyzer was pretty good. But no question SmartSkip was a "genius" whereas ShowAnalyzer was just "pretty smart".

Well, the upshot was I abandoned the whole idea of producing commercial-free recordings for WMC. There just was no need to spend all of that extra machine resource wear-and-tear, electricity, etc., just to produce a playback file that would auto-skip through commercials.

Instead, I simply use the 30-second skip button on the WMC remote to manually skip through commercial pods. WMC supports both repeated pushing of the skip buttons, or alternatively just entering a digit (from the numeric keypad) and then pushing the 30-second skip button, to multiply the number of 30-second skips by that digit and accomplish a single "long skip" of the total duration of the multiplication. And there's also the 7-second skip-back button (if you overshoot), with both the skip-back and skip-forward intervals user-customizable to other values using Windows' REGEDIT (if you're not happy with the default 30 and 7 second values). I've changed the 7-second skip-back interval to 12-seconds in my own WMC setup, as I felt that while 7-seconds gave a very precise navigation it was simply too short for how I normally wanted it to function.

Anyway, bottom line is I prefer to be able to watch recordings either (a) immediately after they're made, or (b) WHILE they're being made if I start viewing during an active recording that started a while ago. I don't need to have them be commercial-free as determined by software. I'm perfectly able to push the SKIP buttons on the remote to whip through commercial pods if that's what I want to do. No bother as far as I'm concerned.

So my own "production" WMC setup does NOT use DVRMSToolbox or ShowAnalyzer.

But I do have My Channel Logos installed, for its nice improvements to the WMC Guide.

Thanks again!