Good way to transcode WMV-HD/WMA to H.264/AC-3?

[sofakng]

I have some 720p/1080p videos in WMV-HD and WMA Pro Audio that I'd like to convert to .MKV/AC-3.

What's a good way to do this without losing any quality?

[stax76]

Is it 5.1, if so can you upload a sample? I would like to try if StaxRip can do it easily.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Well, don't expect miracles, because you will always lose quality. That being said, a good H.264 encoder like x264 should provide quite transparent results, likely at a lower bitrate than the source!

WMA Pro is a little tricky, but as stax76 mentioned, StaxRip can probably handle it.

Otherwise, you could probably do a more manual workflow, using FFMS2 to feed the audio and video into an AviSynth script, and then use a tool like MeGUI to automate the encoding and muxing process.

What kinds of bitrate budget do you have? I.e. - are you going to store on a a removable media, or do you store straight to hard drive? If the latter, CRF encoding will probably be your best bet, possibly including some gentle prefiltering, maybe with fft3dgpu or something equally fast. IIRC, WMV-HD stuff is usually CBR, and therefore has a rough time (blocking) during complex scenes.

If you're going to stream to a Media Center, like the WD TV, or a game console, you should also read up on profiles that match these devices for VBV compliance etc.

I think you'll be quite impressed with the quality overall. x264 is an amazing tool, and it quite handily beats all known VC-1 encoders (and most any other codec) in nearly situations. Heck, if you can afford to do some nice filtering with MDegrain and GrainFactory to clean up the image.

Aften for AC3 will give excellent results with at least 384kbps for 5.1ch audio, preferably 448 or 640 if you can afford the bits.

I'd be curious to see a sample! I once owned a copy of Terminator 2 which included a WMV-HD disc in addition to the DVD. How did you rip it?

Good luck!
~MiSfit