DVR-MS Video Format

What is DVR-MS video format? DVR-MS video format (Microsoft Digital Video Recording) is a proprietary video and audio file container format, developed by Microsoft.

Audio and video are wrapped in an ASF container with the extension DVR-MS. Video is encoded using the MPEG-2 standard and audio using MPEG-1 Layer II or Dolby Digital AC-3 (ATSC A/52). The DVR-MS video format extends these standards by including metadata about the content and digital rights management. The extension was originally used by Zach Johnson who at the time was a developer for the television recording engine for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Some universal transcoders may be able to convert DVR-MS video format to other formats, such as OJOsoft Total Video Converter. DVR-MS video file formats can also be converted to another format using ffmpeg with DirectShow settings and a compatible MPEG-2 decoder like NVIDIA's PureVideo Decoder. Changing only the container format (extracting the original MPEG-2 data without any visual loss) is possible via VLC media player's transcoding wizard. The DVR-MS video file formats are an ASF file containing multiple MPEG-2, and data streams. Files in this format are generated from the Stream Buffer Engine (SBE.dll), a DirectShow component created by Matthijs Gates for Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Vista.