Demux Audio from WMV file?

[Sound person]

Hello. I need a command-line method to dump the Audio from a WMV (7) file to either .WAV or .MP3. I have found how to use mplayer to do this, but it crashes if the file is longer than a few minutes. After much forum reading and googling, I ask this forum. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[SeeMoreDigital]

Have you had a look at some the command line tools available over at Micro$oft's own web site: -

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx?

Look under: Windows Media Encoder / All Versions


Cheers

[Sound person]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
Have you had a look at some the command line tools available over at Micro$oft's own web site: -

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx?

Look under: Windows Media Encoder / All Versions

Yes, I did look at that, but all I saw were tools for encoding to WMV, not decoding from WMV (audio, in this case). I'll look more carefully in case I missed something.

Thanks.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Sound person
Yes, I did look at that, but all I saw were tools for encoding to WMV, not decoding from WMV (audio, in this case). I'll look more carefully in case I missed something.

Thanks. I wonder whether the "Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless to PCM Converter" would work?


Cheers

[Koti]

Windows media encoder package has a stream editor.
You can demux the audio with that and then code to prefered format in a variety of apps.

I know its alot to install just for that :(

[tigerman8u]

IIRC Virtualdub 1.3c handles wmv

[cyberVera]

TMPGEnc

[movmasty]

Originally posted by Sound person
Hello. I need a command-line method to dump the Audio from a WMV (7) file to either .WAV or .MP3. I have found how to use mplayer to do this, but it crashes if the file is longer than a few minutes. After much forum reading and googling, I ask this forum. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Record it while playing.

[Sound person]

Thanks, All for the excellent suggestions. I looked into some of these and did some other searching when I stumbled across a great little utility called avs2wav, which will dump the audio output of any AviSynth script to a wav file. I made a little .avs script that says nothing but: DirectShowSource("test.wmv")...then ran "avs2wav test.avs test.wav", and it produced the sound in test.wav file.

Using avs2yuv as input to mencoder, I can now transcode my stockpile of old WMV7 recordings to xvid 2-pass at half the bitrate and free up several hundreg gigabytes of disk space. I know there are shareware GUI programs to do this, but I really wanted to use command-line, free tools.

BTW, you may be wondering why I can't just use mencoder directly, as it is supposed to be able to read WMV files. However, it doesn't read WMV7, but only WMV9, according to its documentation, and I can concur that it usually crashes on WMV7 files.

As for the other ideas posted,
I wonder whether the "Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless to PCM Converter" would work?
According to Microsoft, this really only works for .wma files that are losslessly compressed.

Windows media encoder package has a stream editor.
You can demux the audio with that and then code to prefered format in a variety of apps.
I tried this program out, and it looks useful, but it will not decode the audio, but only pull out a .wma file from the .wmv container. Plus, it is GUI and, therefore, hard to script.


IIRC Virtualdub 1.3c handles wmv
I think I did get Virtualdub to work for this purpose earlier, but I couldn't get the audio sync right. Also, I really wanted a command-line solution.

TMPGEnc
This is the one thing I didn't get a chance to try. Might have worked.

Thanks, again, for all the suggestions. If anyone wants me to post the shell script to do the conversion, let me know.

Cheers, All!