I'm preparing a CD, running under windows media player, that is designed to demonstrate the convergence of cinema and PC animation.
The Lock On videos are without doubt, IMHO, the best current example of this. Nothing that I have seen on such TV shows as Discovery Wings animations matches what you people are producing.

I have Lock On videos that run under Windows Media Player, and some that only run under DivX.

Questions are:-
a) How can I link these videos together so that they are a continuous stream under WMP?
b) Under WMP, on start up I get the WMP surround screen, which I get rid of by doing ALT/ENTER. Is there a way to launch and get full screen immediately?

Obviously I can achieve my objective by running each video through FRAPS 2 and capturing, but I am concerned about potential loss of quality.

Any advice will be gratefully received.

regards

Jim

Hey Jim, sorry, i dont really have the answers to these questions, but i would recommend to you that you also post this in the general forum. That way, you are more likely to get more help, since pretty much everyone drops by the general forum daily

Cheers

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I've never tried it, but this...

http://www.riverpast.com/en/prod/videocleaner/features.php

...looks like it might be able to convert divX to .wmv without much pain. There's a watermarked trial at...

http://www.riverpast.com/en/prod/videocleaner/download.php

I know virtualdub's no good because the Microsoft codecs cost money to play with, so there's no save as .wmv option.

http://forums.divx.com/viewtopic.php?topic=57493&forum=19 might also be useful, but I've no idea what Windows Media Encoder is. Fortunately, Microsoft do :-)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

There's always going to be a loss of quality in conversions, and it may be "simpler" to use Fraps2 to grab a blown up copy of the replay, then load that file into Windows Movie Maker and recompress it as a .wmv

Messy stuff though. Hope you get some more useful advice than this :-)

Andrew McP

Just tested a divx5.2 .avi to .wmv conversion with Windows Media Encoder. It's slow, and picking the right "flavour" of wmv is tricky, but it seems to work well. A 20Mb file turned into a 26Mb file without any obvious downgrading of image quality.

On the "Content Distribution" page I chose "Windows Media hardware profiles", and on the next page chose the second option (which outputs a 640x480 image) "Main video profile - medium (CBR)".

No doubt life will not be this simple for you, these things never seem to be. But this is actually a useful tool which I didn't know about before, though I guess it overlaps with the stuff in Windows Movie Maker somewhere under the skin.

Anyway, hope it helps.

Andrew McP

PS FWIW once installed (you may have it already without knowing it) you'll probably find it in Programs/Windows Media. I didn't check before I reinstalled and found myself presented with a "do you want to repair or delete an installation" window. I just did a "repair" and things worked. Whether they will after a reboot is a different matter ;-)

Mmm... <takes the time to re-read the question>. Of course neither of those posts helps you merge movies or play them fullscreen from the outset. However getting them all into one format ought to be a step forward... certainly it'll help ensure (hopefully!) they can be played on most PCs without additonal codecs.

http://www.virtualdub.org/ is very useful for gluing some types of avi/mpeg together (there's an "append" on the file menu, but as I mentioned before, it doesn't handle wmv... or didn't last time I tried anyway. Converting all wmvs to divX or something else which Virtualdub can cope with may be a better step, with a final conversion back to .wmv at the end using WME.

Sounds like a lot of work though, with losses bound to occur in multiple conversions. There has to be a more elegant solution.

Andrew "read the question twice, *then* answer" McP

PS I'm sure windows media player settings are dependent upon the individual computer and not the movie file, so there's no way of "forcing" it to full screen.

Andrew,
Many thanks for all your comments. I'll be doing some experimentation.

Best regards
Jim

Jim, you can always encode the vids in Mpeg format and put it on DVD.