Best WMV encoder

nickwil · **8th July 2008, 06:00 PM**

Help. Now that hard disk prices are so cheap I have decided to move away from H264 and start encoding my movies to WMV. Problem is I can’t seem to find a decent WMV encoder. I have tried Windows media encoder (keeps crashing even with the Vista hotfix) and others won’t encode 5.1 audio or retain the original screen DVD resolution. I have tried Windows movie maker but no matter what settings I use it won’t resize the video to the original settings. Help. Can anyone advise me on a one stop DVD to WMV solution that will retain the original DVD quality?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out.

Cheers,

Nick

AdrianW · **8th July 2008, 09:59 PM**

So, why would you move away from H264 to WMV?

With appropriate settings H264 produces awesome video quality. And if you consider disk space cheap then there's no need to re-encode the audio at all, just mux the original AC3 or dts track with the re-encoded video.

I find MeGui does an excellent job (using the x264 encoder). You can set it to encode ripped DVDs without changing the resolution at all - so it will keep the exact same resolution as the DVD (i.e. anamorphic). I then use mkvmerge to merge the video, audio (and even chapters if required) and tell it that the video aspect is 16:9. The end result is virtually identical to the DVD.

nickwil · **9th July 2008, 03:02 PM**

Adrian,

Sorry but I didn't mention it earlier but this is for playback through the Xbox 360. The 360 does not support AAC 5.1. Only stereo.

sklebrun · **2nd September 2008, 12:39 PM**

I use TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress to convert everything to wmv. It supports WMV9 and WMA 10 Pro allowing 5.1 surround - which is ideal for converting DVDs. The Xbox 360 converts the WMA 5.1 audio stream back to Dolby Digital 5.1 on-the-fly.

There are some 'gotchas' of course. The conversion has to be done with 'square pixels' to maintain the aspect ratio, which results in loss of vertical resolution for wide screen. Normal DVD is 720x576 (pal) which is then stretched horizontally across the TV for wide screen. The Xbox360 doesn't seem to support this so you need to resize the video during conversion based on the aspect ratio of the source. (the aspect ratio is on the back cover of the DVD)

Scott