Making clips Windows Media Player likes

[Gary Corcoran]

Warner,

> In message: <200706051638.l55Gc9Wu014651 at smtpclu-3.eunet.yu>
>             Nikola Lecic <nlecic at EUnet.yu> writes:
> : Hello
> : 
> : On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 09:59:03 -0600 (MDT)
> : "M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> : 
> : > In message: <20070605162424.0510a425 at localhost>
> : >             Norberto Meijome <freebsd at meijome.net> writes:
> : > : On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:15:10 -0600 (MDT)
> : > : "M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> : > : 
> : > : > Is there a secret to making video clips that windows media player
> : > : > likes?  So far, all the ones I've done result in a fatal error at
> : > the : > end.  Is there a code/format I should specify to make things
> : > good? : > 
> : > : > The source material is DV video that I've encoded with Kino and
> : > then : > split apart to get a few short (~10s) clips that are the
> : > highlights. : 
> : > : what encoding? wmv? 
> : > 
> : > The clips are currently encoded for a DVD in mpeg2video format.
> : 
> : I think mencoder (a part of multimedia/mplayer) can do what you want.
> : It handles mpeg2video.
> : 
> :   "mencoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder) is a simple movie encoder,
> :    designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies (see above) to other
> :    MPlayer-playable formats  (see  below). It encodes to MPEG-4
> :    (DivX/XviD), one of the libavcodec codecs and PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio in
> :    1, 2 or 3  passes. Furthermore it has stream copying abilities, a
> :    powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate,
> :    scale, noise, RGB/YUV conversion) and more."
> : 
> : (mplayer manpage).
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion.  I've been using mplayer/mencoder for about
> three years now to view videos and to do some minor transcoding of
> videos.
> 
> Hoever, I've spent the last three weeks with kino, mencoder, ffmpeg,
> mpg2desc, mpegtranscode, and mpginfo trying to come up with something
> that will work.  These tools all work great together to translate the
> DV videos into generic MPEG streams that dvdauthor/dvdstyler can use
> to make nice DVDs.
> 
> The specific question I have is what hoops do I need to jump through
> to make it work with Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker.
> What container formats work best when you are sending clips to
> relatives that have just Microsoft's media player?  Which codecs are
> the ones that I want to use?  Does that answer change if I use Windows
> Movie Maker?
> 
> So far my attempts to discover the right things by trial and error
> have been frustrating and have all ended in error.
> 
> So my question isn't 'what tools' to use.  My question is 'what
> parameters to feed to the tools to be maximally compatible?'

Windows systems do NOT natively support MPEG-2.  They only support it
if they have a DVD player application installed.  I'm afraid the only
reasonable codec (besides a few crappy very old ones) that will work
"out of the box" on windows media player is "windows media video" - wmv.

Gary