I finally got my Mini working after not using it for over a year (long story). During which time I also upgraded my machines to Win7/64.
Been using Media Centre since XP MCE, so I now have a large collection of both DVR-MS and WTV files.
The main reason I bought it was to play this recorded tv on the bedroom tv. Seems I bought the wrong box? Surely it can't be that much to ask, it's not as if these are obscure formats?

Please read below :

DVR-MS
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DVR-MS (Microsoft Digital Video Recording) is a proprietary video and audio file container format, developed by Microsoft used for storing TV content recorded by Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Multiple data streams (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 format extends these standards by including metadata about the content and digital rights management. Files in this format are generated from the Stream Buffer Engine (SBE.dll), a DirectShow component introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 1.[1]
[edit]Playback and editing

The DVR feature of Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows Vista and the Windows 7 version of Windows Media Center create files in this format.[2] If a recorded broadcast is marked as copy protected, the resultant DVR-MS file can only be played back on the recording device. Unprotected DVR-MS files (files not marked in this way) can be played back on any device running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later Windows operating systems, hotfix 810243 for Windows XP RTM (which adds DVR-MS support to DirectShow), and on Windows Mobile 6. For older Windows operating systems, any third-party media player which supports the DVR-MS format through DirectShow on Windows or by other means on Windows or other platforms can be used for playback

You call it not obscure, but I think many of us didn't hear from it before (until the explanation above )