no guide for windows media 9 encoding?

[violently_ill]

i've looked all over the internet, and the best i can come up with for windows media encoding is purpleman's wm8 guide at http://www.apachez.net/purpleman/wmv8.html

it was enough to get me started, but the actual process of encoding files in windows media 9 is simpler. right now i'm making full 720x480 dvd rips with 48khz 24-bit 5.1 channel sound with the file size coming out between 800mb and 1gb. the quality is outstanding, but i'm still inexperienced with windows media encoding and i think i can do better. does anybody know if there's a good guide out there written specifically for windows media 9?

[setarip]

Have you tried the site of the "fairly well known" publisher?

http://www.microsoft.com/search/

[Batman]

I'm curious, but what benefits of encoding with wmp9 do you find?IMHO divx/xvid offer much better quality.

[violently_ill]

microsoft doesn't publish any explicit information on how to turn a vob file into a wmv file (although secretly i bet they are praying for us to figure it out). they could have made it easy on us and just natively supported vob format, but that would piss off the hollywood folks and microsoft wants windows media 9 in every dvd player. the encoder itself is easy enough to figure out, it's the frameserving avi/audio extraction and rejoining part that's tricky. each extra step adds the potential for quality loss, hence the need for a specific guide from a real pro.

as for the quality of windows media vs. divx, it depends on how you measure quality. windows media has better compression than divx, which makes it possible to get the full 720x480 and 5.1 channel sound onto a single cd. although the picture resolution is higher, the image is still technically more compressed. divx, by contrast, is less compressed, but the result is usually only 640 or 512 line picture and crappy mp3 stereo sound. personally, i think windows media is better, but in the end it's a pesonal choice.

[setarip]

If you go to:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

amongst all of the available information is a downloadable zipped"Help" file (actually a group of documents). One of the documents is titled:
Windows Media Encoder

It includes the following brief tidbit of information:

"Sourcing from a file
Using Windows Media Encoder, you can source from files with .wma, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .wav, .mpg, .mp3, .bmp, and .jpg file name extensions. (Sourcing from a file with a .mpg file name extension requires a compatible MPEG-2 decoder on the encoding computer.)"

It's usually a short step from a .VOB file to an MPEG2 file ;>}

[violently_ill]

thanks for the tip, bro.

[setarip]

"thanks for the tip, bro."

My pleasure, "bro" ;>}