Help - WMV to MOV converter?

[Jon Stratis]

I personally like Handbrake for video conversions. I've had to do a few format conversions for various websites I've managed (including a fairly big job last year of converting a friends website to be compatible with mobile devices), and found that it's by far the easiest to use. I've only used it on Macs, but it's available for Windows, Ubuntu, and Fedora as well.

[Chris is me]

Each time you convert a video to another lossy format, the quality drops. Do everything you can to keep videos in one format.

ffmpeg or some derivative (VLC) is probably your best bet.

[TD912]

Every time you convert to another lossy format, you lessen the quality.

Think of it as taking a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, etc. It gets worse each time. Plus many half-baked programs are not very efficient when converting. It's one of the reasons why so many amateur videos on YouTube look blurry. If possible, exporting directly to a .mov would be best.

If you can't, set the bitrate for the .wmv relatively high, around 1500kbps for SD content. When you convert to a .mov, set it also around 1500kbps and make sure the video codec is set to H264. This way more of the information is retained. The higher the better, but the larger the file and the longer it takes to encode. There is a lot more to encoding video than that, but those are just some general guidelines.

If it weren't for the submission rules, I would have suggested using Handbrake, as it is relatively easy to use, outputs high quality files using the well-known x264 encoder, and is free. But Handbrake does not output to a .mov file.

I'm not sure why a .mov file is specifically required by FIRST/Autodesk, as the .mov container is slowly being depreciated by Apple in favor of .mp4, which is the standard container for H.264 and AAC audio, which is used in everything from iPods to Blu-ray players. Even standard YouTube video is streamed in H.264 inside a Flash player.

[Chris27]

Just to be clear, a video container (e.g. mov, wmv, avi) is not the same as an encoding format (e.g. XVID, x264). You technically don't have to reencode the video when you extract the video source from one container and put it in another. It is perfectly valid to take, say an x264 video, from a container such as a .mov and place it in another container such as a .mp4. Since the video is not encoded (compressed) again, there is no quality loss.

Typically, different video and audio codecs are associated with different containers. If you choose a bizarre codec container combination, your video player may not correctly handle the file. You typically don't have to worry about this as most video encoding software will choose the codecs for you when you select the container type.

I can also vouch for handbrake (or at least the mac version)

[Chris is me]

While the above is true, you can't contain many encoding formats wmv uses in mov containers