[Ben Waggoner]

I consider the whole Windows Media functionality in Cleaner unsupported, honestly.

If you want to make decent WM on Mac, you’re better off using either Flip4Mac or Compression Master.

If you want to make backwards compatible WMV7 codec files, you’re better off doing it on Windows.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

The best compressor power per watt these days is dual-core Athlon machines. ProCoder does very well with multiple processors – dual dual-core AMD would be the fastest, although not cheap.

For RAM, I’d want 1 GB for SD (which you’re doing) and 2 GB for HD.

No PCI acceleration boards for ProCoder.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Cleaner 6 is hopelessly broken when it comes to MPEG-1/2 encoding, so I don’t recommend you use it in any case.

However, you’re trying to make a HD MPEG-2 – SD maxes out at 720×576. For HD MPEG-2 on the Mac, check out Main Concept or Squeeze 4.1.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

ASF and WMV are both “Advanced Streaming Format” files – exact same wrapper, different extensions.

WMV works fine from (I believe) Windows Media Player 7 on.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

By .asf, do you really mean .asf, or do you mean a Windows Media file? ASF was the old extension for WMV years ago, but all modern tools make .wmv. You can take a .wmv and rename it .asf and it’ll work fine. But if they’re specifically asking for .asf, maybe they want ancient codecs as well.

Assuming that a modern WMV file would work for you, you have two options worth mentioning:

Squeeze 4.1 + Flip4Mac

or

Compression Master

Both do a great looking WMV9 WMV file.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

The players are auto-correcting to the 4:3 aspect ratio, and reporting the displayed pixels, not the actual encoded pixels.

Everything is working fine – don’t sweat it.

That said, when I make MPEG-1 for computer playback, I prefer to do it at 320×240 square pixel, so we don’t have any of that scaling going on anyway.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

I’ve heard of people getting GREAT success out of using iChat AV using FireWire input that’s the FireWire preview output of a NLE.

Better yet, you have two computers on your end, each of which is conferencing you, the other the NLE.

Need to be running Mac OS X 10.4 everywhere for that to work, of course.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

If you want to archive video on DVD-ROM, a MPEG-2 program stream is a good choice.

If you want to make a DVD-Video that can play back, and also be used as source, you’ll want a tool like DVD Studio Pro.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Squeeze Enterprise would give you better quality QuickTime than ProCoder.

And on Mac one could whip up something very easily with QTKit for QT7.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

For what it’s worth, I’ve been able to do watermarks in ProCoder just fine. So it does work. I can’t remember if it was a chroma-keyed or alpha channeled one.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html