Wm9 ?

[elneckio]

Out of the in built snapstream options I am recording most things at 'Best' mpeg2 quality and then converting down to VHS Wmp 7 quality. The conversion is approx a minute per minute of footage.

This gives very good results, however I was wondering what peoples opinions are on Wmp 9 and if it is worth looking into ?

Also I have tried the DivX fix file with registry change but I still end up with 150meg files which don't play correctly on a couple of conversions here. Any divx tips ?

[exorcism]

Originally posted by elneckio
Out of the in built snapstream options I am recording most things at 'Best' mpeg2 quality and then converting down to VHS Wmp 7 quality. The conversion is approx a minute per minute of footage.

This gives very good results, however I was wondering what peoples opinions are on Wmp 9 and if it is worth looking into ?

Also I have tried the DivX fix file with registry change but I still end up with 150meg files which don't play correctly on a couple of conversions here. Any divx tips ?

DivX doesn't seem to work completely one way or another. As far as WMV, 7 is fine, it's not likely you'll notice a large difference (especially at higher bitrates, over 600k probobly) especially if you're watching it on a tv. Also the extremely long recompression times makes it not really worth it (wmv9 seems to take 3 or 4 times longer than wmv7 to recompress.) Snapstream is adding two-pass encoding to the next release I believe, and that'll improve quality a lot and only take about 2x as long (two-passes, duh ) rather than 3 or 4 times longer for one pass wmv9, or 6 to 9 times longer for two pass wmv9.

WMV9 has a lot of other advantages that snapstream doesn't take advantage of, but may one day.

Also, in addition to being harder to encode, wmv9 also requires more cpu to decode than wmv7 as well.