WMV8 - bad, WMV9 - good.

[pooksahib]

Hi. Yesterday, I asked about converting a file's DAR and poisondeathray & jagabo both suggested the perfect solution. Thanks again lads. I wonder if I'll be so lucky today...

My newly installed hard drive media player only likes wmv's of the WMV9 variety. I've just found out one of my files is WMV8. Is there a tool to convert an 8 to a 9 or is it best just to do a full recode?

Regards

[poisondeathray]

Converting it using WMV9 will lower the quality (anytime you re-encode using a lossy format will cause generation loss)

There might be another reason for it not playing on the media player; post the mediainfo (view=>text), copy & paste it back here

[pooksahib]

Hello again poisondeathray. Info attached as requested. Supplementary question: how do you mean "converting it USING WMV9"? I thought WMV9 was a format but that suggests it's a tool...

Cheers

[poisondeathray]

yes, it's a compression scheme , but there are several tools that can do it

everything looks like it should work.

"wmv2" is the fourcc code for wmv8 series video. "wmv3" is the fourcc code for wmv9 series. "wvc1" is the fourcc code for advanced profile

wmv2 is backwards compatible - anything that can play wmv3 should be able to play wmv2 . So I don't know why it's not playing .

Does it work ok in a PC media player (e.g. mpchc, vlc, kmplayer etc...) ?


BTW, when you copy & paste the text, you just need to highlight it , right click, copy, and right click, paste the actual text into the browser (you don't need to take an actual screenshot )

[PuzZLeR]

wmv2 is backwards compatible - anything that can play wmv3 should be able to play wmv2 . So I don't know why it's not playing .

Maybe it doesn't even play any FourCC WMV3 (WMV9 Simple/Main) content either. I have a hunch it's a "WMV HD" player.

Although I could be wrong, since I don't have one, but if indeed it is such a player it may only support VC-1 (such as the Advanced profile of WMV9/VC-1 implementation with FourCC WMV9).

"WMV HD" is a marketing, not a technical, specification and the intention may be to showcase VC-1 as a stand-alone format and disregard any of its WMV lineage.

[pooksahib]

Thanks poisondeathray. The rogue file is perfectly at home on the PC, plays with any player. My new toy is a Western Digital Hub and the list of playable formats is quite specific – WMV9/VC-1. No matter, xmediarecode has converted it into an mp4 of equal clarity.

Thanks for the copy/paste tip. Is there a way to do that with jpeg files?

[DarrellS]

Not sure about the newer WDs but the 1st and 2nd generation WDTV would only play WMV3/WMV9 with wma1 and wma2 audio. It would not support windows media 9 professional audio which did not make any sense. I can only think that it was a licensing thing. I believe all hardware media players at that time had the same issue. Not sure about now.

[PuzZLeR]

Not sure about the newer WDs but the 1st and 2nd generation WDTV would only play WMV3/WMV9 with wma1 and wma2 audio. It would not support windows media 9 professional audio which did not make any sense. I can only think that it was a licensing thing. I believe all hardware media players at that time had the same issue. Not sure about now.

I believe a product like this is useless without wide compatibility.

[kenchen]

My media player plays only WMV9 files. It fails on WMV7 and WMV8. Is there any way to make WMV7 and WMV8 files into the same format as WMV9 without loss in quality?

Or can I simply extract the MP4 files within them? Audio is unimportant and if that's what chokes my media player, I don't mind discarding them or re-encoding them.

[El Heggunte]

My media player plays only WMV9 files. It fails on WMV7 and WMV8. Is there any way to make WMV7 and WMV8 files into the same format as WMV9 without loss in quality?

Nope, but you can minimize the loss of quality by re-encoding with a low-quantizer value (between 2.5 and 4.0) in the so-called constant-quantizer mode. Notice that, in this way, the file size of the re-encode is unpredictable and perhaps "too big" for your expectations.

Or can I simply extract the MP4 files within them?
Audio is unimportant and if that's what chokes my media player, I don't mind discarding them or re-encoding them.

What ?

[Cornucopia]

Or can I simply extract the MP4 files within them? Audio is unimportant and if that's what chokes my media player, I don't mind discarding them or re-encoding them.

What El Heggunte was probably wondering was: Why would you think there was MP4 within? WMV files use the ASF/WMV container, which allows containment of VC-1,WMV9, WMV8, WMV7, and similarly formatted video codec streams, and of WMA1, WMA2, and similarly formatted audio codec streams.
While the ASF container SHOULD be considered to be possibly a general-purpose container, in practice, it is NOT. It rarely contains ANYTHING except later-generation MS-specific codecs (even though it was originally MS's intention to have ASF take over the world).

To re-iterate: there is almost positively NO mp4 file inside. No Xvid/Divx, No h.264/AVC. Probably not even Mpeg4-SimpleProfile.

You could extract the WMV8, etc files within, but likely not many muxers would like it, so not much you could do with it then.

No, you need to re-encode, using a bitrate/quality factor that minimizes the quality loss.

Scott

[kenchen]

I thought WMV is just a wrapper/container for the MP4 movie file inside. My media player may be looking at the header and simply skips the file if it says anything other than WMV9. But if I can extract the MP4 data from the WMV7 or WMV8 files and have the media player play the raw MP4 data, it may recognize it. Would this work?

[kenchen]

Ah ok, thanks. I posted the above response right before the answer to my question came. Please disregard it. Thanks for your help!