Neither are without frustrations and annoyances – typical of any huge piece of technology.
By now everyone is familiar with the DVR functionality, whether from their Tivo, Satellite, or Cable box – recording or pausing live television is common place. Windows Media Center exhibits the same feature, allowing you to pause a live show for up to 40 minutes. Now, on the surface that seems like an awfully long time but things can happen and time quickly slips away from us. The time limit on other devices exists because of a limitation of the recording buffer size – often because the initial devices lack the extravagant capacity that exists in our computers. If you find the 40 minute window too constricting and have the space to allocate to the solution – Media Center can be tweaked with a little Registry work.
Dive into the Windows Registry from the Start search menu with regedit.
Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\DVR
Once you are within the DVR key locate the value BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds in the right-hand panel.
Double-click the entry to edit it’s DWORD value and change the decimal value as appropriate – the measurement is in seconds. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as changing the value directly to the number of seconds you wish to use for the pause buffer. Instead, Media Center uses BackingStoreFiles, eight in fact, and each File can store seconds worth of this value you are changing.
Confusing? It’s not really – you just need a bit of math. Take the BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds and multiple by 8 to determine the amount of seconds worth in the buffer.
- A value of 450 equates to a buffer of 60 minutes.
- A value of 900 logically equals 120 minutes.
Lastly, reboot your PC to apply this registry change.
