Converting .MOV to odd resolution .WMVs

[Stephen Abbott]

Hi Cratin,

FFMPEG is one good way to go. You will most likely need to use it via terminal, but it’s very powerful and one of the most tolerant of things which *should* work but are not commonly used, like odd frame sizes (or frame rates, for that matter).

I’ve also experienced embedded WMV-only playback devices being very picky about the flavour of WMV you give then. FFMPEG will give you decent control over that, too, though it will take some learning of the intricacies of a not-so-simple command line tool.

If you do go for FFMPEG, you can download a binary for Mac from a site like this: https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/

And you’ll need some terminal instructions to get the binary installed for proper use from the terminal: I used the instructions under #2 of the answer here: https://superuser.com/questions/624561/install-ffmpeg-on-os-x

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More generally, FFMPEG is a great Swiss-Army-knife for encoding and decoding all sorts of exotic codecs and formats. Lots of apps are built on top of it, but I like to use the terminal version for the more challenging tasks … it’s slower than click-n-drag, but you get a lot of fine control. The only downer: I haven’t had much luck with GPU acceleration on the Mac, so any heavy lifting transcoding goes via other apps.

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Stephen Abbott