I am looking for a good AVI to WMV converter. Any good ideas? I have found some on download.com, but what do you guys find to be the best?
Why WMV? I personally find it an infernal format.
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?
Give SUPER Media Converter a try. I’m not going to lie, it’s a royal pain navigating through their website to actually download the program, but once you get to the download it’s all smooth sailing. Basically, the program is a GUI for many of the open-source video encoders, like ffmpeg.
It’ll handle just about any imaginable format to just about any other format, as long as you have the codecs installed on your computer.
Also, I second Sean’s inquiry about WMV, as there are much better (and more modern) video codecs like h.264 (which can be put into AVI, MPEG4, or MOV files). h.264 may take longer to encode, but the file sizes will be smaller while video quality will be higher.
I am going to play a file on my Xbox 360, it does not support AVI.
I play AVI files encoded as Xvid on my 360 all the time. It has been supported for a while now.
I have found a semi-decent converter for you Xbox fans out there. Videora is Vista compatible and is very easy to use.
Go get SUPER. Its a great program.