We’ve been huge fans of Windows Media Center for longer than this site has even existed, but it’s been more than seven years since Microsoft has updated it in any meaningful way. It was still possible to use Media Center in Windows 8 and 8.1, but when Windows 10 was released Microsoft stopped offering the home theater PC application. Long before then many users had already started to migrate away from Media Center. Some have moved on to Kodi, some chose Plex, while others decided to abandon the HTPC altogether. If you’re considering making a jump to Kodi or Plex there’s a new tool that could help make that move a little easier. It’s called mpconverter.
mpconverter is a tool that has been created to make importing Windows Media Center recordings into Kodi and Plex a painless process. For some shows, like your typical prime time dramas, you could simply rename your recorded files and place them in a folder structure that is supported by Plex. But that doesn’t work for everything. One key example is sports. You see, Plex and Kodi both use TheTVDB to get metadata about shows. If you recorded a soccer match there isn’t going to be a listing for it on TheTVDB.
mpconverter takes a different approach to migrating recordings. Instead of looking at an online database for metadata it simply looks at the WTV file that was created by Windows Media Center. It’s a solution that seems so simple! Of course Windows Media Center knew what it was recording, so why not take the metadata that’s already stored with the recording when moving it over to Kodi or Plex?
Metadata migration isn’t the only thing that mpconverter does. It will also transcode the recordings. It can use either FFMPEG or Handbrake to do the conversion, and the mpconverter developer has already done the hard work of creating transcode profiles that will result in high quality video files.
If you’re like us, you probably have quite a large library of recorded shows. Fortunately, mpconverter also has tools to automatically process all of the files in your recorded TV library. Whenever a new show is recorded the tool will detect it and perform all its magic.
mpconverter has a lot more features than we’ve been able to cover in this short post. It’s a tool that can be configured to make a transition from Windows Media Center pretty painless with just a little bit of setup work on your part. Did we mention it’s free? At that price you’ve got nothing to lose! Check it out and let us know how you like it. And if you have any feedback for the developer make sure to leave a comment on his blog!
Source: mpconverter
Have you been able to get this to work?