Quick and Dirty Guide to coding video for Windows Media Play

[Guest Dr Who]

I know that people are working on the definitive guide for this but due to a number of requests I am going to post the settings I have been using for coding video into .wmv for use in Windows Media Player.

First download the latest Windows Media Encoder.

I set the total target bit rate to 250kbps with a video size of 220x176. I set the frame rate to 25fps (I haven't had a chane to alter this yet to see if it makes much difference to the file size). I set the key frame interval to 2, buffer size to 5 seconds, video smoothness to 80 and decoder on auto. The audio sampling was 32kbps, 44KHz and mono. I coded both audio and video with the WM9 codecs. These settings give an output at about 2meg/minute.

On playback it is important that you have quit all open applications and that you turn the backlight timeout in power settings to never - otherwise the video freezes.

You could increase the audio sampling to 44kbps, 44KHz and stereo if that is your bag and you have space on your card. I have also tried setting the target bit rate to 180kbps, which gives a file size of ~ 1.3meg/minute which looks OK and also 120kbps which gives 1meg/minute file size but the film starts skipping frames on motion.

I have attatched the .prx files I used for encoding, which can be loaded once you have gone into windows media encoder and selected convert a file and followed the wizard. Go into properties, click on the compression tab, edit the destination and then import the appropriate .prx file and it will set everything up for you. Smartphone is 2meg/minute, Smartphone2 is 1.3meg/minute and Smartphone3 is, unsuprisingly, 1meg/minute.

WME coding.zip

[Guest revolution.cx]

Good advice there.

For those of us with the SMT5600 and WMP 10 movie clips are automatically converted when using Windows Media Player to sync. Unfortunately the clips are 176 wide and don't scale to full screen when rotated and played "full screen" in Pocket WMP.

Anyone know how to get WMP to make converted movies 220 wide? I've searched the registry and poked around for XML files but no luck so far.