batch WMV to AVI that will maintain video bitrate and frame dimensions

[chief1972]

I have a lot of WMV videos of varying bitrate and frame size that I need to convert to AVI or Mpeg. I'm familiar with lots of software that can convert these but I don't want to reduce the quality of the better videos or increase the size of the poorer quality vids by using the same setting to batch convert. Is there a software that will detect the bitrate and frame size for each vid and batch convert them for me?

Thanks.

[DarrellS]

Anytime you recompress, you're going to lose quality, especially from a super compressed file like WMV.

You can try using Virtualdub job control to convert to AVI. You'll need to set the video codec (xvid with a target quantizer of 2) but audio will be hit or miss.

For MPG, you can use batch mode in TMPGEnc.

[jman98]

While it's true that re-encoding will involve some quality loss, with a high quality source carefully encoded at a high enough bit rate you might not notice any loss. However, your goal to not increase the size is not realistic for MPEG-2 and probably not either for AVI (I assume you mean Divx/Xvid here when you say "AVI").

Some Divx/Xvid encoding programs allow you to specify a quality setting that theoretically produces output at the same quality as the original. However, such a setting gives you not control at all over the bit rate used so you can easily end up with a larger file in the Divx/Xvid version. I don't do a lot of Divx encoding and I don't do quality based encodes, so I can offer no personal experience with this. I simply point it out as an option.

As far as encoding to MPEG-2 goes, you'll need to use approximately twice the bitrate of your source to get the same quality. Some MPEG-2 encoders may allow you to also do a quality based encoding which theoretically produces output as good as the input, but again, I don't ever do that and you should expect much bigger file sizes in MPEG-2.

I am not aware of any software that will magically produce quality based encodes to your exacting specifications. There are batch programs, yes, but they typically require more user input than you seem interested in doing.