What is the best program to encode...

[Alex26]

the VOBs to WMV?

Is there any aplication able to open the VOBs and convert them directly to WMV?

[Guest]

Please follow forum rules, specifically rule 12: Do not ask what's best. Thank you.
:readrule:

[Alex26]

ups, sorry Donald :eek:

may I ask what program do you recommend?

[Doobie]

may I ask what program do you recommend?

Why would you convert a VOB to WMV? You're like asking what someone recommends that you poke in your eye.

[Sirber]

:goodpost:

There are so many codec avalible which are better than WMV :sly:

[Wilbert]

Perhaps you can answer the guy his question instead of nagging about WMV?

Is there any aplication able to open the VOBs and convert them directly to WMV?
No, not that i know.

[Guest]

may I ask what program do you recommend? Sorry, Alex, but I've never made a WMV in my life, and I'm not aware of any such program.

[Doom9]

nic has written an encoder: http://nic.dnsalias.com/wm9enc.html I have never tried it though. The Microsoft WME isn't really well suited for the task as it doesn't accept suitable input formats, but perhaps it can be tricked with the AVI frameserving capabilities of ffdshow (makeavis) together with AviSynth. WMV creation isn't exactly a popular subject around here so I'm afraid you'll pretty much have to work this out on your own. Either way there's no way around you having to familiarize yourself with avisynth frameserving (check my guides).

[Wilbert]

Thus

- create d2v with DGIndex.
- demux audio with DGIndex (downmix it to 2.0 WAV)
- create avs with AviSynth (use dgdecode to open d2v, and include the audio too).
- open avs in Nic's encoder and encode to WMV (http://nic.dnsalias.com/WM9Enc.html), don't forget to install the WM9 codec too.

This should do it.

[jstelly]

This is just a bit of a brain dump...

I've been working on a tool for distributing wmv encoding for quite a while now. WME isn't really up for the task. Wilbert's process is probably the way to go. Install WM Player 10 (or the WM Format 9.5 SDK) so you get the WMV 9 Advanced profile, then look at this page (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/codecadvancedsettings.aspx) for some tips about advanced encoding settings.

When encoding, use the advanced profile, complex, with the max complexity (4). This just turns on most of the features of the codec and the video will take slightly more CPU power to decode (and a lot more to encode) but for quality based vbr it reduces the size a good bit.

I've fooled around with the registry settings from my link above and have what I think works pretty well. I'm encoding from DVD to 640x480 at 97 quality-vbr. There's a bit of ugly blockiness in dark regions with my settings, but it's not bad if you're not looking for it. With these settings, encoding Star Wars IV (fullscreen) with 5.1 audio at 93 quality, it's right at 2 gigs. Quality (to me) looks better than what you could get from xvid in the same size. (Yeah, I'll probably get tarred and feathered for saying that).

Force Range Reduction has a huge effect on compression without losing too much detail, but it introduces a bit of blockiness in dark areas. If you reduce it a little (0x02020202) the resulting wmv will be larger but will look a bit better.

Using a IBBPBBI sequence by setting b-frames to 2 can improve quality a little for a minor increase in size in the few tests I've run but it causes problems for me when I merge segments.


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Scrunch\WMVideo]
"DenoiseOption"=dword:00000000
"Force LoopFilter"=dword:00000001
"Lookahead"=dword:00000010
"NumBFrames"=dword:00000000
"Perceptual Option"=dword:00000001
"Force Range Reduction"=dword:04040404