How to convert a WMV file to something Toast can use.

[vaj]

The best way I found to do this involves a PeeCee. If you download a free application called STOIK video convertor ( http://www.stoik.com/products/morphman/mm30_svc.htm ), it will allow you to save the WMV as an AVI. The trick is you MUST pick both an audio and a video CODEC that Quicktime can use. I use MJPEG (Motion JPEG) for video and A-Law for audio. The file it saves is quite large, but they work beautifully in Quicktime Player and also burn flawlessly in Toast 6 (and are much smaller again after Toast re-encodes them). I actually think the resultant video DVD's I have made this way look better than the original in Windows Media Player (less compression artifacts)! I have not tried this in Virtual PC, but it should work there as well. STOIK VC is very fast at encoding them to Quicktime useable AVI's.

-Vaj

[dnix71]

I use ifoedit in Virtual PC, so I tried Stoik that way with no success. The host machine is a 1.25GHz G4 eMac with 768mb pc2700. The virtual 98 had to be upgraded with DirectX8.1, the 9-series WMP and k-lite codec pack standard to be able to play and render a 768kbs Windows Movie created in WinME, captured from a vhs tape.
The original WMV plays well on a real pc and on the Mac in OS X in WMP for X, but not well(jerky sound, dropped frame video) in Virtual 98.
Transcoding went at about 1.4fps, so the one hour WMV would have taken about a day to complete. I stopped at about 1000 frames as a test.
If you save the QT.avi to the virtual desktop it will take as long to copy it back to the host machine as it did to create it. Only m-player for OS X could render the partial file copied over to the host, not QT or even VLC.
The second test save was made directly to an external fw hd to save time getting it out of the virtual 98 with the same results.
The 1000 frames test files played back in mplayer had choppy sound and frozen video.
I haven't tried the conversion on the WinME machine yet.
edit ***** 11/9/04 10 p.m.
I running Stoik now. This is useless. I have a 1.1 GHz eMachine with 512mb pc100 and a 7200 rpm ultra dma 133 hd. Stoik is converting 1.08fps. WTF? Virtual PC ran one-third faster. VLC couldn't play the clip and when I tried to play a 48sec converted avi in WMP 9 it locked up the computer and I was forced to physically unplug the machine to shut it down.

[terryj]

New issue of Mac Addict (#100)
says that forty-two DVDDVX Plus
can do it. Anybody tried it yet?

[anaxamander]

I've used a darwinports build of mencoder (part of MPlayer) to convert a .wmv or .asf file to a divx avi file. I don't know if that helps you or not. If you have ffmpegX installed then in Terminal.app:

'/Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/mencoder' -ovc lavc /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/Some\ film.asf -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vbitrate=12000:vhq:keyint=250 -o /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode.avi

I still haven't found a perfect sweet spot for bitrate settings, so you may need to readjust. You can tinker around with the settings by converting only a minute to see the effects:

'/Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/mencoder' -ovc lavc /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/Some\ film.asf -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vbitrate=12000:vhq:keyint=250 -ss 0:25:30 -endpos 0:01:00 -o /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode.avi

Yields a tasty divx avi file. Though I have absolutely no idea if Toast can use it. Quicktime doesn't complain, so I'm happy.

[vaj]

New issue of Mac Addict (#100)
says that forty-two DVDDVX Plus
can do it. Anybody tried it yet?

Yes I have tried it. It does transcode SOME WMV's, but not ALL.

[Dante101]

I got Forty-TwoDVD-VXPlus, but can't get DivX to install.

I'm running OSX 10.3.5

The installers for both DivX 5.1.1 and 5.2.1 give an error saying the installer appears damaged.

I'm just trying to get some WMV files to open up in Quicktime so I can convert them to m2v files for DVD Studio Pro...

And while I can't yet view them, I did a couple of tests with 42 - and the resulting AVI files have a size of Zero KB. Doesn't Forty-Two make standalone files, not files that are dependant on another file?

[mhar4]

I've got both ffmpegX and Forty-TwoDVD-VXPlus to work on some asf files, but the problem I have had is playback problems around key-frames with mplayer. Those problems get reencoded along with the rest of the video, leaving the resulting avis somewhat unsatisfactory.

[MacDSL]

Have you tried just opening Toast and chosing the Video tab and dropping the WMV into the window? I have had great success in getting Toast to read old .AVI, .WMA, .WMV files then I can export the file to a .DV for editing in whatever I want...

[decay]

what version of stuffit are you using? maybe that's the issue... ?

I've got both ffmpegX and Forty-TwoDVD-VXPlus to work on some asf files, but the problem I have had is playback problems around key-frames with mplayer. Those problems get reencoded along with the rest of the video, leaving the resulting avis somewhat unsatisfactory.

[terryj]

I've used a darwinports build of mencoder (part of MPlayer) to convert a .wmv or .asf file to a divx avi file. I don't know if that helps you or not. If you have ffmpegX installed then in Terminal.app:

'/Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/mencoder' -ovc lavc /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/Some\ film.asf -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vbitrate=12000:vhq:keyint=250 -o /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode.avi

I still haven't found a perfect sweet spot for bitrate settings, so you may need to readjust. You can tinker around with the settings by converting only a minute to see the effects:

'/Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/mencoder' -ovc lavc /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/Some\ film.asf -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vbitrate=12000:vhq:keyint=250 -ss 0:25:30 -endpos 0:01:00 -o /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode.avi

Yields a tasty divx avi file. Though I have absolutely no idea if Toast can use it. Quicktime doesn't complain, so I'm happy.

I tried as you suggested on an .wmv file that plays from start to finish in
VLC.
after 39% processing, I got this fatal error:
sh: line 1: 721 Segmentation fault

and Terminal stops. Is there a way to force it through to the end?

[anaxamander]

Well... I don't know what happened. I don't know if it is possible to skip over a few seconds in a conversion automatically, but you can try manually. This will yield 2 avi files, but it MAY be possible to join them into 1 (I haven't really tried). For now, I'll just assume you got a watchave Part1.avi (which might be missing an index, so it won't be playable - or seekable in QuickTime).

When you were converting on on the command line, you probably had output like this:

36 duplicate frame(s)!
Pos:   109.1s    280f (55%)  10fps Trem:   0min   0mb  A-V:0.002 [103:143]

The "Pos: 702.1s" is the time index it is currently working on (and it's not relative, its absolute within the file). Pad that time with a few seconds (say to 709 seconds), and convert that into minuteeconds format. Then:

'/Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/mencoder' -ovc lavc /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/Some\ film.asf -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vbitrate=12000:vhq:keyint=250 -ss 0:11:49 -o /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode2.avi

You may need to reajust the time to skip over the part that mencoder is balking at. I looked over the manpage (pretty dry reading), and I couldn't find a way to be more "error resistant" in a conversion, but that just means that all those options are beyond me, so...

----------------------------
As for joining .avi files... I'm not sure if the first part sould or should NOT have an index at the end. I've used this before (by no means a perfect result - some sort of problem with the avi index), but maybe you might have better results:

First, join the files into a raw combined avi file:

cat /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode1.avi /Volumes/Fire/HOLDING/ReCode2.avi > /path/to/combined/ComboFile.avi

Then try to reindex the who avi with:

mencoder -idx -ovc copy -oac copy -o /Volumes/Fire/FinalOutput.avi /path/to/combined/ComboFile.avi

I hope that helps somewhat. Good luck.

[terryj]

I also purused the ffmpegX forum,
and found Domy's settings to help:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=221165&highlight=wmv

I got the video intact, but even with inverse mapping,
I still got no sound. So i went and used AHPro
to hijack VLC, and re-recorded the audio to 16bit
2 channel 48.8khz. A simple "add scaled" in QT pro,
and I was done!

thanks for the heads up though!