I have hundreds of old MCE 2005 DVR-MS videos, and are now fully on Win7.  We see that Win7 Media Center and WMV 12 plays them fine, but they are "max quality" and need editing, remove commercials, color tweaking, etc. 

We'd like to re-encode to 720p HD format and are thinking H.264 HD - 1080p would be SUPERB, but that may be a stretch?

What's the best path to bring these old videos as far current as possible ... it looks like most are - can you even imagine  this was PRIMO only a few years ago - are 720 x 480 (4:3) BUT scale rather well to even 1920 x 1080! (I guess picking the 3Gb per hour settings has paid off???)

Thanks,

 Scott

Okay sounds like you are trying to do several things.

1) Editing out commericals; there are two ways of going about this one is use DVRMSToolbox with Show Analyzer and set it up to automatically and have it save the file in another format if you want.  The other method is to use VideoRedo and manually edit out the commercials and save the file.

2) Re-encoding will do nothing for you other than saving disk space, unless you are willing to upscale as well. ArcSoft MediaConverter with SimHD will allow you to take an existing file and upscale it.  The only problem I had with ArcSoft Media Converter is sometimes it would have audio sync issues.

Thanks Tracer,

 Regarding the editing, we have successfully used DVR EDIT to "manually edit" for years, but I believe it only worked with MCE 2005 and WinXP.  We have looked at VideoReDo but will read up more about your suggestions. 

 On the "upscale" front, almost ALL of the shows are cooking shows and WELL BEFORE ATSC and 720p/1080i broadcasts.  Almost ALL are 720 x 480 and occupying 3 GB PER HOUR.  I'd love to upscale to 720p, if DVR-MS can be upscaled to 1280 x 720?  What I do NOT know is which of the modern formats to both reduce space, allow for Play-To streaming, and MAINTAIN + ENHANCE the original quality - which program allows color correction, the originals are a bit dark?  These are ALL 4:3, but I am OK with black bars. 

 What upscale format do you suggest?

Scott

I'd say use Handbrake to make H264 MP4s.  I have very good results with the upscaling/artifact removal of my ATI Radeon card.  You can also adjust all upscaling/upconverting features in handbrake such as deinterlacing, deblocking, motion prediction, etc.  I'm dealing with SD DVDs, but should be same as broadcast.

h.264 gives excellent quality and will save some space.  I use a program called Digital Media Converter Pro - it automatically removes commercials, can adjust/color tweak on conversion, provides batch processing, and I can use custom settings to get exactly the output I want.