How to convert DV to *.wmv?

[videocheez]

I have been converting DV to rm in order to distribute some "home movies" over the web to other relatives. I want to make the process easier for them on the other side so that they can enjoy the movies and not get bogged down with downloading Real Player and all of that AOL registration crap the accompanies first time users of Real Player. I was thinking that perhaps a *.wmv file might be a good solution since almost all casual PC users have Windows Media Player.
I need to know which program is used to convert to *.wmv and is the compression similar to *.rm. Also aer there any other popular video compression formats that are useful for delivering via the web.

Thanks in advance,

VC

[lordsmurf]

I use CLEANER 5 for web content.

[David K]

Windows Media Encoder is a free program from Microsoft that encodes to wmv (which stands for Windows Media Video). The program is rather complicated and offers a daunting array of encoding choices, but it does has templates.

For the best compatibility for your recipients, you may not want to use Windows Media Video 9 (MIcrosoft's most recent version of wmv) because many people may not have dowloaded and installed it.

As far as best compatibility goes, perhaps mpeg 1 is it, since every media player can play it. The downside is that it does not offer the same compression as say, DivX and other mpeg 4 codecs.

[SMHarman]

If you download Windows Movie Maker 2 then you can do this easily in the save as options.

It will save a wmv file at the required bandwidth for your recipents connection. Less bewildering array of options than windows media encoder.

[videocheez]

Thanks guys, these all look like promising solutions. I think I will try a comparison of a variety of the suggested methods and see which one gives the best quality per file size.