My experiment with Windows Media Encoder
So a few TAP participants have asked me if the recordings of the TAP Kickoff training are available anywhere. Sadly, the answer has been 'no' because we haven't had time to compress and edit the recordings. Right now the files are *huge* and have a lot of extraneous stuff at the beginnings and ends. I've decided to take advantage of this quiet week to figure out how to do this.
After a quick email to Santhosh, a PSS engineer who supports both Speech Server and Windows Media, I found out I can use the Windows Media Encoder + the utilities it comes with to accomplish my task. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Trimming extraneous content and the beginning and end *seems* easy enough - there's a Windows Media File utility that allows you to do that and seems very straightforward.
But the compression part is a little trickier. Armed with some info from Santhosh about bit rate and video size, I popped open the Encoder. On the 'Properties' tab, there are a dizzying array of options, almost enough to make me crawl under my desk and give up. After making a copy of the source file, I poked around at the Source, Output, and Compression tabs and chose some settings that seemed right, selecting VHS quality video and CD quality audio. I'm not sure if my machine is slow, or what, but when going through the different settings and clicking Apply, it took the Encoder a full minute or two to "come back" from whatever it was doing.
Then I held my breath and clicked 'Start Encoding'. I had no idea it would take so long. Since the source file is 287 MB, and my machine isn't super-fast, it's not a huge surprise. Looks like it'll take about 30 minutes to see if this worked.
... 30 minutes elapses...
Hmm. I got 3 "unexpected errors in the audio codec" in the log. And the resulting file is only 15 kb. So I'm going to assume that didn't work, especially given there's no sound in the resulting file and it's about 30 seconds long.
I guess I'll try again and see if copying the files locally helps, and I'll adjust some of the audio settings as well. If you have any tips on this, feel free to pass them along!
I found this whitepaper helpful for very basic terminology, etc. on encoding digital media: Introduction to Digital Media and the Windows Media 9 Series
So that's what I'm up to this quiet holiday week! What's going on out there?
