Claus Brod: Software blog - Audio kills the video star (Jan 29, 2006)

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---+++ [[BlogOnSoftware20060129][Audio kills the video star]]  (Jan 29, 2006)

Movie podcasts are the next big thing after blogging and podcasting. 
For the time being, I'll stick to my blog, thanks very much for asking, but
I do listen to a lot of podcasts while commuting or exercising. Occasionally, 
I also watch some of the [[http://channel9.msdn.com/][Channel 9 videos]] where Microsoft engineers
and employees talk about their work. No matter what you think about the company
in general, everybody knows that Microsoft hires smart people, so 
there is a lot to learn from them.

Many of those videos contain demos or at least feature casually-dressed geeks
scribbling frantically on whiteboards, which, of course, is a must-see (ahem).
But quite a few videos could be enjoyed almost just
as well in pure audio format. Unfortunately, most of the Channel 9 content is in video
format (*.wmv) only, which will neither fit nor play on my 512 MB MP3 player.

I'm pretty much a newbie in all things video, and so I was glad that
[[http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=51257#51257][Minh Truong suggested a way to convert WMV to WMA]]
using [[http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx][Windows Media Encoder]].

This actually works fine, but it's a lot of settings to remember (see the screenshots below), and
it produces WMA instead of MP3 or OGG format which I'd prefer.

<a href="%ATTACHURL%/encode1.jpg"><img src="%ATTACHURL%/encode1_small.jpg"/></a>
<a href="%ATTACHURL%/encode2.jpg"><img src="%ATTACHURL%/encode2_small.jpg"/></a>
<a href="%ATTACHURL%/encode3.jpg"><img src="%ATTACHURL%/encode3_small.jpg"/></a>

Fortunately, I found that Windows Media Encoder actually ships with a script called
[[http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/AutomatingEncoding.aspx][WMCmd.vbs]]
which takes a gazillion parameters and automates the conversion process!
And indeed, the following trivial command line produces a WMA audio file
from a WMV video:

<pre>
cd c:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder
cscript.exe WMCmd.vbs -input c:\temp\foo.wmv -output c:\temp\foo.wma -audioonly
</pre>

There are a number of options to control the quality and encoding of the output which I haven't explored at all.

So now I only need to find a reasonable WMA-to-MP3 converter which can be used
from the command line. [[http://members.home.nl/w.speek/batchenc.htm][batchenc]] 
and [[http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm][<nop>dBpowerAMP Music Converter]] look like they could help with that part of the job, but I'm not sure. Sounds like I have a plan for next weekend :D

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