WMV with incorrect framerate

[toomuchdogfur]

Hi,

I have a 640 x 480 25fps WMV which is irritatingly out of sync, due to what seems like an incorrect frame rate. Unlike AVIs, I can't simply throw the video into VirtualDub and change the frame rate in the header to pull it into sync, which is annoying as this would only take seconds and require no re-encoding. I'm just asking, is there any way to simply change the frame rate specified in the header of the WMV? It seems like WMVs are a pain to do anything with... wonder how Microsoft plans to get ahead with it if it legally threatens anyone who tries to make tools for the good of the format.

Oh and if that is an unanswerable question, then instead what format should I use as an in-between format for conversions? I want to use SUPER to convert the WMV into something usable by VirtualDub or VirtualDub MOD, so which format will give me the best quality? (I tried MPEG-2 but found that it paled the colours)

Thanks!

[redwudz]

wonder how Microsoft plans to get ahead with it if it legally threatens anyone who tries to make tools for the good of the format.

Just my opinion, but they don't really care, as they are already 'ahead'. There are other formats that operate in a similar way. Real Video and Quicktime are two that come to mind. They both make it difficult for third party software.

Don't use them is the best way I can think of to let them know what you think of them. Or convert them to a more user friendly format.

EDIT: Second part of your question. I like DV format. It's great to edit and fairly easy to convert to from the different formats. It's a fairly low compression, so not a lot of quality loss, especially if the quality is not that great to start with. Add the Panasonic DV codec or similar to VirtualDub Mod and you can easily edit DV for free, then output in DV format and encode to what you want. I frameserve DV from VDM directly to TMPGEnc encoder for MPEG-2.

There are other encoding options, also.

[toomuchdogfur]

OK thanks for the reply, but SUPER doesn't seem to work with DV video. Instead, I re-encoded the video into XviD + MP3, which SUPER did with surprisingly almost no loss in quality, then I used VirtualDub to tweak the frame rate a bit until it fell into sync - 24.995fps instead of 25fps. And to think that was pulling my movie out of sync by a handful of seconds near the end!

I'm still annoyed at how much effort had to be put into correcting such a simple frame rate problem. I don't think MS quite has a stranglehold over video with WMV yet, as DivX\XviD and MPEG-4 (AVC and H.2XX specifically) are still big in most portable players and such, but I sure hope it wont. It doesn't deserve it in my opinion, as WMV is still too resource hungry in its decoding.

Thanks again!