Hello all,
I'm promising myself to get good about blogging, especially as we go into NAB and the many initatives we'll be launching there. Alex Zambelli has given me a great excuse for a first pre-show post: a new version of his WMCmd.vbs Visual Basic script.
This is the new version of the command-line encoding script that ships with Windows Media Encoder, adding support for the many new encoding options available with the Windows Media 11 codecs. This makes it possible to make batches using the new settings while software vendors prepare versions of their products that offer direct GUI controls for these parameters.
There have been some great improvements in the last two versions
- Adaptive Chroma Search options are fixed
- -a_input allows using different files for audio and video sources
- A bunch of presets grouping parameters for different quality/speed tradeoffs. It's much easier to pick -v_preset extreme instead of tweaking a half-dozen parameters
- You can now safely run multiple simultaneous instances of the encoder at once. I've been doing this a lot this week - you get more total throughput running four simultaneous single-threaded encodes instead of one 4-way threaded encode at once.
- Improved documentation.
Alex will be updating the GUI WMV PowerToy with new features soon.