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Old 21st May 2020, 22:43   #16  |  Link
benwaggoner
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Portland, OR
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zambelli View Post
As for WME9... It was mostly just a shim for Windows Media DMO/MFT libraries, so if one is just looking to encode video to WMV9/VC-1, the codecs are already installed with Windows - it's just a matter of building the right MF/DShow graphs. Back in its heyday there was WMNicEnc, which basically did exactly that, and some years later someone wrote WMAEncode using the same approach for WMA.
The VC-1 encoder in Expression Encoder was based on Microsoft's VC-1 Encoder SDK, which wasn't actually all that much different from the native Windows encoder (wmvencod.dll), at least when it came to producing WMV output. In fact, considering that the native Windows encoder DLL outlived the VC-1 SDK, who knows, it might even be a better encoder these days. I haven't encoded anything in VC-1 in at least 6-7 years.
I think there were some perf improvements that came out in Windows after the final build of Expression Encoder. Windows 7 (or was it 8?) had about a 30% speedup over previous versions due to skipping a bunch of stuff on B-frames that didn't do anything meaningful to improve them. Plus more sane defaults, like having the in-loop deblocking filter on by default.

Using the DLL also allows for 64-bit for more perf, while Expression Encoder and the VC-1 SDK were 32-bit only.

Lookahead Rate Control was only in EE and VC-1 SDK, IIRC, so those are probably still unbeatable for 1-pass CBR quality.

I actually did some VC-1 encodes last year as part of my Benwaggoner Compression Challenge. I wanted to see how well the adaptive resolution adaptive GOP duration VC-1 encoder compared to more modern codecs. Terribly, it turns out, and the resulting file is nearly impossible to play without a .dll installed by Expression Encoder.
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