Windows Live Movie Maker??

[BlockABoots]

Have been using Windows Live Movie Maker, to encode my gameplay video captures from my Xbox 360 and was wondering what method/codec WLMM uses for its encoding process as it seems to be able to encode a 60min capture (1920x1080, 8000kbps and 30fps) in around 40 minutes and a very reasonable 2.8-3.5GB file size and the output file is fairly good, obviously using a program like VirtualDub using x264vfw codec on medium settings give a superior output file but it take takes around 2hr 15 and 4.2-5.5GB files sizes, and im not sure if its worth all this extra time and disk space for YouTube upload video?.

So was wondering how WLMM can encode at a really fast rate and still have a relatively small and good quality output file at the end?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

It's a Microsoft product, so it probably uses WMV9/VC1, which is known to be inferior to H.264 (x264). But you could easily find out by using a tool like MediaInfo (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en) on the output file ;)

About the encoding speed: x264 provides a lot of options, so it can be tweaked from "very slow" to "very fast" encoding speed. I highly recommend you use an up-to-date x264 CLI build with "--preset" option.

Finally, if you upload your videos to YouTube, they are going to re-encode your videos anyway. So all you can do is upload a "good" quality source and hope they won't screw it up too much...