Does Windows Media Encoder work on Windows 10?

[orion44]

Has anyone used Windows Media Encoder on Windows 10?

Does it work properly?

[videoh]

Yes.

Yes.

[orion44]

Yes.

Yes.

Did you use the 64 bit version of the encoder or the 32 bit?

[videoh]

Sorry, never used it personally.

[benwaggoner]

Did you use the 64 bit version of the encoder or the 32 bit?
The 64-bit version was always a little fraught IIRC.

The best encoder for WMV files is Expression Encoder 5 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27870), which is free and works on Windows 10. Only 32-bit, but Large Address Aware.

You can pay extra to get H.264 support, but I can only imagine how glacially slow and primative that implementation would seem from today's perspective!

[tormento]

It would be even more interesting to know how to demux WMV to primitive streams, how to feed AviSynth with video part and how to convert to other formats the audio too. :)

[filler56789]

It would be even more interesting to know how to demux WMV to primitive streams, how to feed AviSynth with video part and how to convert to other formats the audio too. :)

1) use asf2vc1;
{assuming nobody uses the FourCC "WMV3" anymore ;)}

2) before anything else, better remux to AVI :devil: with VirtualDub's direct stream copy;

3) wma2wav for decoding, your favorite audio compressors for re-encoding;

[benwaggoner]

1) use asf2vc1;
{assuming nobody uses the FourCC "WMV3" anymore ;)}
Lot of the WMV files out there in the wild are WMV3; maybe even the majority of them. WVC1 really was only there in the last few years of Windows Media and Smooth Streaming.

[foxyshadis]

It would be even more interesting to know how to demux WMV to primitive streams, how to feed AviSynth with video part and how to convert to other formats the audio too. :)

The primary difficulty is that there is no raw stream format, not even a de-facto one. All raw streams only exist on the fly, from container to container. There were a couple of ideas, and ffmpeg will demux something that it'll sometimes remux, but it never hit the critical mass where defining a raw bitstream was needed. All WMV exists within ASF, MKV, MPEG-PS, or MPEG-TS, and that's just all there is to say about that.

[StainlessS]

I think VirtualDub 1.3c had some kind of asf capability, authors were asked to take it down by M$.
It used to be (I think) on original Doom9.org main site which is now down for some time.
1.3c source does not exist on SourceForge where 'all vd source' is supposed to exist, but you may find it by
looking for "VirtualDub_source-v1.3c.zip". [or PM me if anyone wants it].

EDIT:
does not exist on SourceForge where 'all vd source' is supposed to exist
https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub/files/virtualdub-win/

[gonca]

Try
https://www.videohelp.com/software/Virtualdub-1.3c-ASF

[StainlessS]

Thanks gonca, some time since I had the executable.

[benwaggoner]

The primary difficulty is that there is no raw stream format, not even a de-facto one. All raw streams only exist on the fly, from container to container. There were a couple of ideas, and ffmpeg will demux something that it'll sometimes remux, but it never hit the critical mass where defining a raw bitstream was needed. All WMV exists within ASF, MKV, MPEG-PS, or MPEG-TS, and that's just all there is to say about that.
VC-1 Advanced Profile did support an elementary stream format, but Main and prior WMV versions did not.

*.vc1, IIRC? Although I rarely used it for much.

[zambelli]

The primary difficulty is that there is no raw stream format, not even a de-facto one. All raw streams only exist on the fly, from container to container.
VC-1 Advanced Profile did support an elementary stream format, but Main and prior WMV versions did not.
*.vc1, IIRC? Although I rarely used it for much.
Yeah, VC-1 AP had a standard elementary stream format, though I can't remember if that was defined in SMPTE 421M or in some other standard. But it definitely did exist.

VC-1 SP and MP, because they originated as WMV9 codecs, were indeed tied to ASF container so they never had an officially standardized ES format. However, there did exist an unofficial one used internally at Microsoft. I only knew it by its extension, RCV, but I honestly have no idea what it stood for. I distinctly remember using an ASF2RCV command line tool.

Ben, what do you think is the statute of limitations on our Microsoft NDAs? :D

[zambelli]

As for WME9... It was mostly just a shim for Windows Media DMO/MFT libraries (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/medfound/workingwithcodecmfts), so if one is just looking to encode video to WMV9/VC-1, the codecs are already installed with Windows - it's just a matter of building the right MF/DShow graphs. Back in its heyday there was WMNicEnc (https://www.videohelp.com/software/WMNicEnc), which basically did exactly that, and some years later someone wrote WMAEncode (https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=90519.0) using the same approach for WMA.
The VC-1 encoder in Expression Encoder was based on Microsoft's VC-1 Encoder SDK, which wasn't actually all that much different from the native Windows encoder (wmvencod.dll), at least when it came to producing WMV output. In fact, considering that the native Windows encoder DLL outlived the VC-1 SDK, who knows, it might even be a better encoder these days. I haven't encoded anything in VC-1 in at least 6-7 years.

[benwaggoner]

As for WME9... It was mostly just a shim for Windows Media DMO/MFT libraries (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/medfound/workingwithcodecmfts), so if one is just looking to encode video to WMV9/VC-1, the codecs are already installed with Windows - it's just a matter of building the right MF/DShow graphs. Back in its heyday there was WMNicEnc (https://www.videohelp.com/software/WMNicEnc), which basically did exactly that, and some years later someone wrote WMAEncode (https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=90519.0) using the same approach for WMA.
The VC-1 encoder in Expression Encoder was based on Microsoft's VC-1 Encoder SDK, which wasn't actually all that much different from the native Windows encoder (wmvencod.dll), at least when it came to producing WMV output. In fact, considering that the native Windows encoder DLL outlived the VC-1 SDK, who knows, it might even be a better encoder these days. I haven't encoded anything in VC-1 in at least 6-7 years.
I think there were some perf improvements that came out in Windows after the final build of Expression Encoder. Windows 7 (or was it 8?) had about a 30% speedup over previous versions due to skipping a bunch of stuff on B-frames that didn't do anything meaningful to improve them. Plus more sane defaults, like having the in-loop deblocking filter on by default.

Using the DLL also allows for 64-bit for more perf, while Expression Encoder and the VC-1 SDK were 32-bit only.

Lookahead Rate Control was only in EE and VC-1 SDK, IIRC, so those are probably still unbeatable for 1-pass CBR quality.

I actually did some VC-1 encodes last year as part of my Benwaggoner Compression Challenge (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175776). I wanted to see how well the adaptive resolution adaptive GOP duration VC-1 encoder compared to more modern codecs. Terribly, it turns out, and the resulting file is nearly impossible to play without a .dll installed by Expression Encoder.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Thanks for all you guys did for the ecosystem back in the day at Microsoft :)

Major league trailblazer status!

[benwaggoner]

Thanks for all you guys did for the ecosystem back in the day at Microsoft :)

Major league trailblazer status!
Sometimes I think of it as a dead-end waste of time. But Smooth Streaming begat DASH. VC-1 yielded a good licensing regieme for H.264.

Expression Encoder was also the absolute best designed desktop compression tool in history. Alas, that's a whole market sector that seems to have vanished for commercial products.

[zambelli]

Sometimes I think of it as a dead-end waste of time. But Smooth Streaming begat DASH. VC-1 yielded a good licensing regieme for H.264.
It is interesting to see now 10 years later which MSFT technologies from those days ended up having the biggest impacts on the industry. Microsoft PIFF, which was based on ISOBMFF, led to MPEG CMAF and CENC (as well as the ill-fated UltraViolet Common File Format). Smooth Streaming, which was essentially PIFF + XML manifests, led to MPEG DASH. Silverlight (may it rest in peace) MediaStreamSource API established the web app media extensibility model that became HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE).
VC-1, as you noted, drove MPEG-LA to improve H.264 licensing terms, and it ended up powering the first 2-3 years of all HD optical discs, not to mention early Netflix streaming.

So all in all... Even though the individual products failed to win significant market share (mostly thanks to Microsoft's inability to stay focused on digital media for more than 4 years at a time), I think the underlying tech ultimately had a much bigger long-term impact than any of the products it was originally invented for.

[benwaggoner]

Yeah. And the industry still hasn't caught up with Silverlight Enhanced Movies with their Blu-ray caliber extras and navigation.

I recall we did some good things with UX for accessibility using sideband XML for subtitles.