Help! Problems Converting From DivX to Windows Media

[MayorTommy]

Hi,

I am brand new to this video stuff. I have a DivX .avi file that is 15MB that I wanted to convert to a Windows Media format to stream on my website at 250kbps. I read the DivX to ASF tutorial on VCDhelp here but
that tutorial uses Windows Media Tools which I think no longer exists and is now part of Windows Media Encoder 7. The link to WindowsMedia Tools was dead.

Ok so I d/l'd Windows Media Encoder to do the converting. When I tried to
convert the DivX avi file I got a 'corrupted' whatever error. So I didn't know what to do with it. I then converted the DivX file to an ASF using
vidtoasf(?) program, which worked but it created an ASF file the same size, 15MB with a streaming rate of over 700kbps. Too much for web streaming even for people with cable modems and DSL.

So I tried using Windows Media Encoder to convert the ASF file to a 256kbps WMV file. It started working fine, then it got to about 30% done and crashed the program
I tried using lower bit rates, turned off the preview, and it still keeps crashing.

Damn, I just bought a new computer only a few months ago. I thought
I would be able to do stuff like this. The new PC is an Intel 2 GHZ processor with a fairly big hard drive.

I don't know what to do. If anybody could help I'd appreciate it.

Also it would be good to know why I was getting the 'corrupted' error when I tried to convert from DivX.

Also in Windows Media Encoder it seems to automatically be telling me to
output to WMV format. What's the difference between ASF and WMV format? I couldn't find out how to set the output to ASF, not that I have any idea if that might help

Thanks

MT

[KingJohn]

Check your original AVI for junk frames

Vdub > Video > scan video stream for errors

If it finds any
Video > Direct stream copy
Audio > Direct stream copy
SAVE AVI

Save movie2.avi

If the latest Vdub, fails on the scan use "vdub-mp3-freeze.exe" with c:\badframes.log

[MayorTommy]

Thanks for replying to my post.

I will check to see if there are any bad frames in the DivX files but that's not the biggest problem I'm having right now.

Right now I can't even convert ASF files encoded at higher bit rates to lower bit rates. Windows Media Encoder keeps crashing.

I can take a broadband stream file and convert it to a very low 56k stream, but anything faster than that crashes the encoder software.

I'm looking at the CPU load and it's running at 100%. That isn't good obviously. Surely a 2GHZ Intel processor should be good enough to convert to 300kbps stream files?

Is it possible I don't have enough RAM? I have 256MB.

Thanks for any help and advice in advance

MT

[KingJohn]

Nothing wrong with your CPU, BUT !! XP is aaaaaaaaagggggghhhhh for this type of work.