Me: I live in Seattle with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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A while ago I asked how folks convert their digicam videos from AVI files to something smaller. A number of folks suggested ffmpeg. Well it's far to convoluted to even figure out what I needed to install to make it work. Having a command line solution would be nice though so that I could dump any new videos from the camera into a folder and just batch convert them.
Anyway, lucky for me there is a great free solution. It's called the Windows Media Encoder Script which comes with Windows Media Encoder 9 Series.
To convert a folder of movies from AVI to WMV you first need to create a profile. You can do this with the supplied Profile Editor. Here is the one that I am using:
Name: Convert AVI to WMV Audio: Quality VBR / Windows Media Audio 9.2 Video: Bit rate VBR (Peak) / Windows Media Video 9 Video size: same as video input Frame rate: 29.97 Video bit rate (average): 1894.976K Video peak bit rate: 5684.928K Peak buffer size: 5 seconds Decoder Complexity: Auto
Name: Convert AVI to WMV
Audio: Quality VBR / Windows Media Audio 9.2
Video: Bit rate VBR (Peak) / Windows Media Video 9
Video size: same as video input
Frame rate: 29.97
Video bit rate (average): 1894.976K
Video peak bit rate: 5684.928K
Peak buffer size: 5 seconds
Decoder Complexity: Auto
Once you have your profile saved open the command line and enter:
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -loadprofile Canon.prx -input "D:\input" -output "D:\output"
With this script I am seeing 6 - 8 x smaller file sizes. For example a 150 MB video of my cat is now 20 MB. The quality looks the same to me.
There are a lot more details one what you can do in the help file.