Converting .VDR Files to .TS with VLC (Windows 7)

VDR saves TV recordings as .vdr files which can be viewed using players such as VLC. VLC can also be used to convert .vdr files into .ts files, or to transcode them into different formats.

I found various examples on how to use the command-line to convert between the formats, but none of them worked immediately with VLC 1.0.5 under Windows 7, so here are the versions that work for me:

Convert a single .vdr file to .ts:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc"
    -vvv "d:\path\to\film\date-time.rec\‌001.vdr"
    --sout=#standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst="d:\\path\\to\\film.ts"}
    vlc://quit

If the TV recording consists of several .vdr files, using file{append}:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc"
    -vvv "d:\path\to\film\date-time.rec\‌002.vdr"
    --sout=#standard{access=file{append},mux=ts,dst="d:\\path\\to\\film.ts"}
    vlc://quit

I also tried the combination of –sout-all and –sout-keep parameters with the #gather:standard stream commands, but that resulted in .ts files that VLC could not play.

Note that the dst parameter needs to escape the backslashes in the path name, and that not all characters are recognized (probably due to escaping), such as the percent sign %, which is used by VDR to indicate cut films.