Anybody know of a good converter that would enable me to rip these idiotic WMV3 files into something useful? Especially the ones buried in .avi files.
I'm assuming you're asking this question with an inferred "without using a Windows machine." You've come up with one of the few codecs that isn't decodable in Linux yet, and only decodable on Mac OS X by Windows Media Player 9 itself, but only in .wmv container, not .avi like you have.
It seems that all hopes of decoding on Linux and OS X lie on the FFmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org) project figuring out how to decode it. Luckily, on the front page of their site we find:
"(Jan 24, 2005) Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed the recent CVS addition of a VC-9 decoding implementation. It is still highly experimental but should eventually serve as a basis for decoding Microsoft VC-1/VC-9/WMV3/WMV9 video data."
So you might futz with what FFmpeg has in CVS, or if you really want the end result and don't care how to get there, grab a Windows machine and use something like http://www.virtualdub.org/
-- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
