Windows compression settings

[Chris Blair]

You could likely go as high as 5MB/sec and still get consistent playback off of a newer, high-end laptop. But data rates (around 2-3MB/sec) would be more reliable. I’d suggest using 2-pass wmv encoding if you’re got that option from your transcoding application or process.

As for size, we’ve output HD files as big as 1280×720 in the wmv format and had no issues playing them back from a laptop that has a lot of horsepower and a good-quality graphics card. I’m sure you could do other sizes too.

I’m curious if there is any particular reason they want wmv? There are many other formats that would likely be as good or higher quality, be more efficient and require smaller file sizes. H264, VC1, and MPG2 would all easily playback at NTSC sizes (720×480) and look great.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Tom Mooney]

We are exploring doing the encodings in H264. Their is a potential that the movies may need to be played back on multiple computers and as a rule they do not load Quicktime on their systems. I am most concerned about the bit rate which we will probably stick with something around 3MB/sec to play it safe.

[Chris Blair]

There are other media players out there that will play just about any file type. VLC (Video Lan Client) Player, KM Player and M Player all come to mind. They’re all free and all are very small, simple installs. In fact, I don’t believe any of them install additional codecs or windows system files.

Here are some links:

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

https://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/download

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Players/MPlayer-for-Windows-Full-Package.shtml

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com