On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Stroller <strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote: > > On 1 May 2012, at 16:52, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> I'm looking around on the web for ways to convert wmv files to mp4. So >> far the most common solution seems to be ffmpeg but when I try that it >> doesn't seem to understand the video files. The most common type of >> comment people give is that this should be straight forward if 32-bit >> codecs are installed. I'm running 64-bit and don't see what flags I >> might need to set to get that? > > It's worth telling us *why* you want to do this. It may be better if you can > avoid this conversion. > > .mp4 is a container format and wikipedia tells me that WMV is a codec, but > that .wmv files are usually WMV codec wrapped in an ASF container. > > Since .mp4 video most always means h264 encoding, this means slow and dirty > transcoding, which will inherently cause loss of video quality. You want to > avoid transcoding if you can. > > http://html5.xoofoo.org/video.html > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Video > > Stroller. > >
Hi Stroller, I subscribed to a trading service that provides 6 1/2 hour videos of the day's market action with audio commentary for each trading day of the week. I like this trader who does the commentary so after the market closes I'd like to review what he thought about the day's action. These files are available only in wmv format. They play fine inside of a Windows VM using Windows Media Player on my Gentoo box but I'd prefer to be able to review them in Linux using xine or some other app. The quality of the video and audio isn't real high to begin with. 6 1/2 hours and they only run about 50MB each. I don't think converting to mp4 would cause me much concern. Additionally if they are mp4 I could watch them on my Kindle Fire. So far I've been unsuccessful with the mencoder suggestion. I'll keep plugging away as I think I'm done with trading today anyway. Big move. Caught most of it. Good to take a few minutes off. Cheers, Mark
