A. By default, XP MCE 2005 stores all recorded programs in the Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Recorded TV folder on the system drive. Recorded programs are stored in DVR-MS format, which is a Microsoft format based on digital video recording (DVR) technology. The content is encoded as MPEG-2 video stream, and the files can be very large, an hour show can use 3.5GB of disk space. Part of the reason for this large space is that a live video stream can be paused, time shifted, played, and recorded without interrupting the stream.
The XP Media Center Recorded TV (.dvr-ms) format also allows for the storage of metadata about the content. For example, .dvr-ms files often contain complete show title, date and time of broadcast, and various data classifications, which isn't possible in a regular MPEG file.
