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My review of MCEBuddy will be mostly on a functional level, as I'm no videophyle, so I haven't tried all the different options and configurations. But so far, as I've used it, MCEBuddy does what it's advertised to do. I set it to watch a folder of DVR-MS files, and boom, it converts them all to Divx automatically! The conversion looks pretty darn good too. But like I said, I'm no videophyle, so what I think looks good, I'm sure someone else will say looks crappy.
Ease of use is great. I'm pretty sure a non-technical person could pick it up and use it no problem. Point it to your source directory, give it a destination directory, choose your format, and you're done. But there seem to be enough configurations to satisfy the pickier users. I've only tested out the Divx conversion, which worked great. But it's got a list of formats longer than my... well, it's pretty long. I'm excited to try out the Zune configuration, cause I'd love to have it convert some of my shows for my Zune.
The only reason I didn't give it a 10 for functionality is that it takes a while to convert the files. I don't do a whole lot of encoding/decoding, so I'm sure it's on par for the course, but it's seems a bit long for me. But if you record a lot of stuff, which I'm sure most people running MCE do, don't point it to your main Recorded TV folder. Your machine will be encoding all day long, and it will never catch up to all the shows you've got. What I do is use a tool to move specific shows out of that folder automatically to another folder, say called "Converting Queue", then run MCEBuddy on that folder only. It might be nice in future releases of MCEBuddy to allow it to create some filters so you could tell it to only convert certain shows. But my setup works great. (If you're curious what I'm using to move the shows, it's Belvedere, from Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/341950/belvedere-automates-your-self+cleaning-pc)
I have not yet tested out the commercial detection/skipping functionality.
Anyway, all around great tool, and named very aptly, because I can assure you it will be my buddy with MCE from now on.
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