Vista - New interest in x264 codec, YT, WMM

I'm not a computer guru: I'm a 45 y.o. classical musician. be gentle.

I took to Youtube, and have films on and off the site. The quality
is generally bad, despite having a pretty good Sony Handycam 400,
MiniDVD (I now know DV is better for editing, but I needed an external
mic option).

I bought Roxio 10 over a year ago: it is largely a trashy program
for editing. makes sloppy mistakes, and is rough with the Sony
miniDVDs.

So I turned to Windows Movie Maker. A decent program, for a free
one. But the results are all trash - no matter how you render it.
Until now. I searched YT for ideas, and people are adding post-fixes
on the film urls to make them higher quality. ex.gratis: &fmt=18

And another maker said H.264 (or X264) was the best, above divX or
XVid - and his video proved it. (DerekforPresident) on YT.
I tried to download the file: I did what he said. My computer would
not let me drag the X 264 file into my configuration area in the
VirtualXDubMod.

I use Vista SP1, and my wmm version says it is 6.0.6000.16386.
My notebook is an HP, 4GB/250. Brand new.

I wonder if I need to remove my WMM altogether, and replace it.
I don't see how to get the x264 codec integrated into my wmm.

has anyone any witty advice?
thanks.


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Sylvester Wager
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Removing WMM would have no impact on other encoding applications, and would
be extraneous to making any progress.
I'm unaware of any ability to plug in third party AVI codecs to WMM. AVI
has kind of become a morass, and most MS apps don't treat it as a primary
format at this point. If 'your favorite tool' encodes to x264-in-AVI,
sounds like you're good. =)

--
Speaking for myself only.
See http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html for some helpful WMP info.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
--
"Sylvester Wager" <Sylvester.Wager.3n1wbb@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Sylvester.Wager.3n1wbb@xxxxxx

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 02:29:05 +0530, Sylvester Wager
<Sylvester.Wager.3n1wbb@xxxxxx> wrote:
I read your post, and you want better quality YouTube videos. For
starters spent a few minutes and Goggle "how to encode for you
YouTube" and you'll find plenty of web sites. One such site is below:

http://webvideotechniques.com/35/how...quality-option

I've used the mentioned super video encoder mentioned with good
results. The critical issues, actually two are frame size and bitrate.
The first is the physical size of video or how much space it occupies
on the screen. If you don't follow the "rules" it will get
recompressed. The more recompressed your video is the worse it will
look. Several codecs have been developed for web use that allow higher
compression (makes the file size smaller) without severely effecting
video quality.

So my suggestion, use Movie Maker to edit your video, then save in a
file format super video encoder or some similar application uses then
encode with that and you end up with better quality. Avoid saving at
"HD" or other higher quality settings, since all that does is bloat
file size and force it to get recompressed which is what kills
quality.

For YouTube and most public video archives on the web the expected
frame size is just 320x240 for standard video and slightly larger for
wide screen. Use as high as bitrate as possible while keeping under
the maximum file size and your videos will look better than the
average crap on YouTube.

One simple thing you may also want to do is bump up Contrast and
slightly reduce brightness. This can help hide artifacts. Also avoid
using too low a frame rate. Many YouTube vids are from cheap web cams
and it shows as jerky playback. Your vid should have a frame rate
between 20-30 frames a second. Depending on which tools you use you
may or may not be able to adjust this. For web vids, if you can a
lessor frame rate usually works fine and gives you more space in the
file's size to increase either bitrate or length of the vid.