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 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 Minh Truong suggested a way to convert WMV to WMA using 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.

Fortunately, I found that Windows Media Encoder actually ships with a script called 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:

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

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. batchenc and 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

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