Dealing with WMV9 (if you != video geek, don't bother)

I was tempted to post this on the media board but it's not anything I see more than 1 or 2 people doing just to watch some VF clips. Odds are excellent I'm the only guy reading this who gives a crap in fact =P

The Problem:
Anything higher than windows media player 6.4 is either unstable, or has a junky interface, or has irritating Microsoft-hates-you protections built into it.

Case in point, windows media player 9... refuses to play divx-encoded stuff or anything else that's considered hacked (I need to confirm this with more than one person). If I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing, resorting even to divx's own player doesn't fix this. MS cockblocks anything from playing divx, your only recourse is to uninstall wmp 9.

Notice also microsoft doesn't make the WMV9 codec a simple download that you can use with WMP6.4 or 7, you must upgrade to to the full package, which is in alpha version still and is bound to take a dive once in a while. That's when it isn't intentionally pissing you off with zealous digital rights management/codec protection crap.

The Solution:
So the point of my post: There's hope. You can play WMV9 movies on your computer, sort of, without installing WMP9. First download this:
http://avifile.sourceforge.net/Win32_dmo.tgz
it's a package of .DLL files that media player needs to work. Stick these in C:\windows\system\ ... you will need one of the nicer zip programs to handle .tgz, I think it's a compressed unix archive. Anyway once the .dll's are in the appropriate folder, the movie will (probably) NOT play for you. BUT! You can now re-encode the movie with windows media encoder version 7, which runs fine on older windows 9x machines.

The end result, I took a crappy wmv9 video and first made it into an even crappier wmv8. Then I decided to run it through WME again and run the profile I'd use to convert a .wmv to .avi. Now I have something with less quality loss, but large filesize. I went to make it an AVI, and virtualdub choked on it. So for now, I give up on WMV9 -> AVI conversion. But wmv9 to wmv8 conversion is still nice, I can see some VF clips I otherwise couldn't. If anyone else has started running into wmv9 clips and they don't want to install alpha software to watch them, let me know and I can give a more concrete description of how to convert.

PS: if you want to know what inspired this rant, there are some new wmv9 movies from an obscure korean site. See media board for details.

 

Hmm, I have wm9, and I do not have any problem playing divx movies, or any other format...

 

^^^ Me too, don't have any problem with WM9.

 

I'll third that. I have WM9 and can still play everything I've ever downloaded, and even stuff I've encoded with hacked codecs.


cheers,
kbcat

 

guess it was a fluke for that one person then -
I'm still naturally suspicious but who knows. I might also say fuckit and upgrade. Still, remember how when wma came out, it was fine until you tried playing copyrighted stuff? Then it pops up some lame web page that traces your ip and demands that you acknowledge you're the legal owner of this material blah blah blah. I'm concerned wmp9 has instituted something like that for video, and we're just lucking out since it's all uncopyrighted stuff we've been trying to play.