What's a good AVI to WMV converter?

[jtdowney]

Kyle, I am hurt you didn't come to me first

I usually take the low road and convert files using a program called ffmpeg. They have a command line tool that can convert pretty much any format into any other format... if you can figure out the command line options.

Something like:

ffmpeg -i file.avi -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wma file.wmv

Also keep in mind that an "AVI file" is ambiguous because AVI is just a container format so it would be impossible to tell which is a superior format just from just the terms AVI file and WMV file. The real thing that matters would be what video and audio codecs are being used inside the AVI file. There is a program that will give you that information from an AVI file pretty easily but you'll need to PM me for it because it has an unfortunate name.

Once you have that information it is a matter of what you use to benchmark, compression ratio, black level recreation, sensitivity to motion?