AVI to MP4 convertors

[dds14u]

Anyone know any good free software to convert WMV files to MPEG-4? Or another more compressed, but still viewable file type.

 

[xtknight]

WMV's aren't like ZIP. ZIP is lossless compression, and WMV is lossy, meaning the original data is gone, and you are stuck with the compressed-looking video. There is little you can do to make it look any better, besides adjusting brightness/etc. There are some commercial programs to convert WMV to MP4 (still the bad quality). The 'free' ways are difficult. You'll probably have to use AviSynth and an MP4 encoder frontend, or DirectShow graphedit. Unfortunately, you are most likely going to increase the file size by converting to anything else. The quality will also be downright dreadful (twice as bad as in its WMV format).

 

[Traire]

WMV is itself, a variation of MP4. Divx, Xvid, WMV, etc are all based on the original MP4 v3 codec developed by MS. After the MP4 codec was finalized and beta closed, it was limited to ouputting only ASF or WMV files. Some ingeneuos coders took the beta MP4, hacked it, and began developing their own codecs which would allow output to AVI, etc. Thus Divx and Xvid and several others were born and began their own evolution.

 

[dds14u]

I'm just looking for ways to keep the file size down.

 

[Traire]

Other MP4 based codecs wont do any substantially better job than WMV. All you can really do with existing WMV files would be to experiment with re-encoding them at various lower bit rates and resolutions till you get what you want.