Right now I'm trying to convert .WTV files into something useful. The one program I've got, Easybreak, is finicky and unreliable.
Edited by - jayo on 2/2/2014 8:56:02 PM
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Goldstein  All-Star Member  "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 |  Posted - Feb 1 2014 : 9:39AM"Necessity is the mother of invention." -- Plato Windows Movie Maker is one of those programs you know the name of, but have never bothered to use. Did I mention it's free? The Problem (Necessity): Some websites (MOFOS, in particular) furnish many of their 1080p HD downloads as WMV files, instead of as MPEG-4/H.264 files as you would expect. Many of these WMV 1080p HD files are problematic. When you try to play them with PowerDVD, they crash the program... They will play, sort of, with Windows Media Player, but if you try to FF or click ahead on the timeline, they crash the program... If you try to open them in PowerDirector, they crash the program... If you try to convert them, say with MediaEspresso or Audials, the programs claim they don't support the format... It's not my hardware (on the two machines I've been working with): #1 i5 CPU with 8GB RAM #2 i3 CPU with 8GB RAM (actually, the faster more powerful CPU) The Solution (Invention): Enter Windows Movie Maker 2012. Windows Movie Maker 2012 will open these problematic WMV 1080p HD files, and "prepare {the} files for faster editing" (the automatic default setting). On a 3-4GB file this could easily take 10-15 minutes. Then, after WMM has imported and prepared the file, you can simply save it as a MPEG-4/H.264 file! (Again, this could easily take some time, maybe 10-30 minutes on a 3-4GB file) Yes, your new MPEG-4/H.264 file is full 192 hex 1080 1080p HD at very high bitrates! (If your original WMV HD file had a 12-Mbps bitrate, so does your new MPEG-4/H.264 file) The new MPEG-4/H.264 file plays perfectly, and retains a very high-level of A/V quality (i.e. the look, not just by the specs). It Gets Better: You can also use WMM to edit and harvest clips from your scene. Want to harvest a cumshot clip?... yes you can  It's free... It works... It meets a need that other programs (for God knows what reason) can't handle (i.e. properly convert WMV HD files to MPEG-4/H.264). Now that I've found it, Windows Movie Maker 2012 is one of the easiest and satisfactory work-a-rounds I've ever used. Just for fun, and to report back to the Forum, I'm going to see how it performs joining and harvesting clips from VOB files. Windows Movie Maker download directly from Microsoft Techie Review: Windows (Essentials) Movie Maker 2012 helpful review [Link] |
| jayo All-Star Member 2117 Posts 7/04 | Posted - Feb 2 2014 : 8:55PM Right now I'm trying to convert .WTV files into something useful. The one program I've got, Easybreak, is finicky and unreliable. Edited by - jayo on 2/2/2014 8:56:02 PM [Link] |
| zambi Senior Member 1451 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Feb 4 2014 : 7:29PM I think Handbrake can be used to convert WMV to MP4 and it can extract video clips. But don't quote me on that since I have yet to try it. CNET Editors' review of Handbrake [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Feb 4 2014 : 8:14PM Easily. In fact, I use them to convert, edit and extract WMV to MP4 files, and they do it all the time. However, as I stated in my opening post...So, the real point of this thread is to identify Windows Movie Maker 2012 as a work-a-round that is able to convert the "bad" files (i.e. WMV files that should work, but have some other issues that interfere with their normal operation). Also, my regular programs (i.e. those mentioned here in this thread) open the majority of 1080p HD WMV files I download from the very same websites. Go figure. [Link] |
| Bill All-Star Member 5334 Posts 6/00 | Posted - Feb 5 2014 : 6:46PM [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Feb 5 2014 : 8:22PM The size of the file, in the case of the problem files I'm dealing with, doesn't seem to be the problem. Rather, the information about the file (i.e. that the file is claiming when other programs look at it) seems to be where the problem(s) lies. For example, look at how the original WMV file -- that doesn't work -- is showing a Data rate of 0 kbps  And, after fixing it (i.e. converting it to an MPEG-4/H.264 file using Windows Movie Maker 2012), it now shows a Data rate of 12256 kbps  I've now repaired four MOFOS WMV 1080p HD files, using Windows Movie Maker 2012, and all four had the exact same problem of "Data rate of 0 kbps" in the original WMV file. Somehow, Windows Movie Maker 2012 is able to "see through" the problem(s) and work with the problem file(s). Edited to add: Now I've found that ALL WMV files show a Data rate of 0 kbps -- both good and bad. So, it must be other issues at work that are not obvious from merely looking at file details via Windows  Edited by - Goldstein on 2/7/2014 7:44:42 AM [Link] |
| zambi Senior Member 1451 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Feb 6 2014 : 2:17PM FYI I have Windows 7 and noticed they have Windows Live Movie Maker installed by default. This is NOT the same application as Windows Movie Maker 2012 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Movie_Maker for details). You have to download Windows Movie Maker 2012 from here. I don't know if this has a batch mode that let's you setup a queue of files to be processed overnight? I believe the other application mentioned Microsoft Expression Encoder does have a batch mode and a commandline interface though, you can download that from here. FYI all these websites are shifting their video content to MP4 format because of HTML5 which will eliminate FLV and probably WMV. If you subscribe to content sites and have a choice of downloading WMV or MP4 I would definitely go with MP4 since that seems to be the industry standard everyone is moving towards. Read this good article from IBM talking about HTML5 and why they are switching video formats. They only mention MP4, WebMV (Google), and Ogg Theora as options. So if you have a large collection of WMV you may eventually have to transcode it all over again to something else. At end of article IBM list pros and cons of each format. [Link] |
| jayo All-Star Member 2117 Posts 7/04 | Posted - Feb 6 2014 : 8:31PM [Link] |
| zambi Senior Member 1451 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Feb 6 2014 : 8:44PM [Link] |
| jayo All-Star Member 2117 Posts 7/04 | Posted - Feb 7 2014 : 4:23PM I'm not in love with WMC by any stretch of the imagination, but it works (for the most part) for what I do. Thanks for the tip re VLC. I hadn't known. I'm trying it now but something's funky with it. Easybreak works some of the time, doesn't work some of the time, and in general is unreliable and unpredictable. I'll have to start another hunt to find out what other alternatives there are. Or what else I could use as a DVR with the computer tuner in lieu of WMC. [Link] |
| Bill All-Star Member 5334 Posts 6/00 | Posted - Feb 7 2014 : 7:07PM [Link] |
| BYOB_Kenobi Senior Member “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Kierkegaard 2684 Posts 8/09 | Posted - Feb 14 2014 : 6:29PM [Link] |
| zambi Senior Member 1451 Posts 3/10 | Posted - Feb 17 2014 : 8:07PM I've never used it though .. I have Tivo. Also checkout this ... Comparison of PVR software packages Edited by - zambi on 2/17/2014 8:10:25 PM [Link] |
| ninja1 Senior Member 2939 Posts 1/08 | Posted - Feb 18 2014 : 11:29PM [Link] |
| CRFlixxx Member 60 Posts 4/13 | Posted - Apr 24 2014 : 6:29AM In a "what the heck" moment I tried putting it in windows moviemaker to convert to wmv...it came out perfect. It sucked that it added an extra step to my editing, but by that point I had tried multiple free and paid software converters and that was the only thing to work. [Link] |
| dogzcatcher All-Star Member Fat bottomed girls make the rockin' world go round! 1551 Posts 5/09 | Posted - Jun 21 2014 : 8:42PM [Link] |
| Evil_Rip Senior Member Power overwhelming 1117 Posts 12/99 | Posted - Sep 16 2014 : 10:13PM A site that can help with future encoding guides is http://www.videohelp.com/ Vidcoder https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/ MediaInfo http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo [Link] |
| Pieps Senior Member Honey, come quick, somebody on the internet is wrong! 9233 Posts 11/13 | Posted - Sep 18 2014 : 2:22PM Get back here. [Link] |
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