Big Screen Blog

Olcay Buyan from MCEDev (author of MCE Customizer) – has been busy creating a great new ‘killer’ addin for Vista Media Center – ‘Media Center Cutter’. A beta version of this app has been shown for the first time at Cebit 2007 (Hannover, Germany) – which started last week.

As the name suggests – this addin allows you to visually edit/cut your DVR-MS files from within Media Center (ie for removal of ads, or removal of pre/post buffering on your files)- using a MCML based User Interface. ‘Jobs’ are then sent to a running Windows Service which performs the conversion/processing work for you. (via use of WCF).

The MCML based visual Editor is also done really well (see screenshots below) – and provides a ‘storyboard’ approach to editing – a huge improvement again on previous MCE2005 offerings.

It’s got some really nice ‘smarts’ included as well (that go well beyond the features offered with the MCE2005 ‘cutter’ programs) – for example :

• Automatically scans your Recorded TV folders so you can quickly find your recordings.
• Automatic Exporting/Conversion of videos to other formats (such as WMV, PPC etc) for use with Zune, iPod’s etc.
• Ability to reorder/reposition your ‘cut’ segments within the final file.
• Auto Correction/Resetting/Updating of Pre/Post Padding within the metadata.
• Retains all the DVR-MS Metadata saved by Media Center (so the info displayed in ‘Recorded TV’ section can function as before).
• Auto Conversion ‘Rules’ – ie. ‘Always convert new ‘The Simpsons’ recordings to wmv for my Zune…
• Multilingual Interface –  German, English for the initial release.

There’s no release dates just yet – but Olcay tells me it’s coming soon!

Check out these nice screenshots below :