Cynical members of the computing community would argue that Microsoft's WMV codec is their way of muscling in on the increasingly popular video editing market. This may well be true, but with the codec being offered for free, you'd be foolish to ignore this important tool - and because it's a microsoft product, windows support is top notch. Put simply, to maximise compatibilty and provide small, good quality video downloads, you'd be mad to overlook the WMV codec. To make the encoding process and the WMV codec accessible to all, MS have cleaned up their Windows Media Encoder package with version 9 by creating a brighter, user friendly wizard driven interface. We take a look at this new application and compare this incarnation to Microsofts earlier Media Encoders.

For the full review, follow this link: Windows Media Encoder 9

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I agree that the MS product is high quality, but I remain frustrated by MS's blatant disregard of industry standards (like support of mpeg2, for example).

This software is fine for simple compilations and publishing to the web. Adding just one tiny step - encoding to mpeg2 - would have made it useful for a lot more people.

Just my opinion.

You can actually encode (to .wmv or .avi) in Windows Movie Maker (free with XP) and not have to download Media Encoder.

This was a review of Windows Media Encoder 9 (which also has more options for encoding than WMM2).

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Was there any guides with using the windows media encoder ? , also what forum is best to ask is using this encoder the best method for converting DVDs to use them for streaming films.

thx