What settings to use in SUPER for .avi conversion?

I edit my video in Windows Movie Maker (WMM). If I save it to .avi, it works fine and can be accepted by Dreamhost FLV converter. However, despite being ridiculous big, that .avi movie is of poor quality compared with .wmv saved from WMM.

I want to use SUPER to do my own conversion from the .wmv hoping to get an .avi of better quality. However, I don't know what settings (video and audio codecs etc.) to use so that the resulting .avi file can be played in QuickTime and accepted by the FLV converter. I tried a few combinations and have not had any luck.

Can someone please shed some lights? Thank you!

Make sure that you're encoding the audio using mp3 codec and for the video conversion I suggest you select DivX. You will probably want to check and see what bitrate is selected in the output section. You'll probably want to select 160 or 192kbps.

See how your results look with these settings and let us know.

Thanks for trying to help. Unfortunately, it did not seem to work. The SUPER generated .AVI file cannot be played in QuickTime.

This screenshot here[ shows the settings I used in SUPER as well as the error message I got when trying to open it with QT.

And here is the .wmv file that I was trying to convert.

What did I do wrong?

I don't know that this will make a difference, but I would suggest selecting the DivX option on the optimizer rather than DX50. That's what I use to convert movies that will play on my dvd player and have had great success with it. Additionally, I always select the "DirectShow Encode" option using ffmpeg but I don't know that this would have an impact.

Also, you selected 192kbps as the bitrate for the video, that's way too low for quality. I was talking about that bitrate for the audio encoding. When I opened this file in Super I left the video conversion stuff at "NoChange" and it showed 1008 kbps for video.

The screenshot of your Super settings shows that encoding is still in progress. It's a silly question, but you did wait for everything to finish right?

I don't have the divx plugin for my player and its getting late, so I will have to followup tomorrow about whether it plays in QT for me or not after converting. Below are some links that may or may not prove useful for you.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=111833
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=144294
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=100&navid=3&itemid=22381

First, thanks so much for taking the time trying to help.

While playing with SUPER, I was really glad to see that it can actually convert .wmv directly to .flv of pretty good quality. So, I don't really need the .avi file any more (I was using my web hosting's Flash Media conversion service which requires .avi).

But to get the bottom of this issue, I tried what you suggested to convert .wmv to an .avi file. (See screenshot.) This time, the size is reasonable. When I open it with QT, I was instructed to install DivX codec, which I did. Now, I could hit play button in QT without getting error. But it was blank screen and no sound. :-( Another hurdle for me!

Oh, yes, I waited for the conversion to finish. The screenshot in my previous post was a composition just to show you what I saw on the screen while converting and while playing in QT. I might be unlucky, but I'm not that dumb. ;-)

I tried converting as well, just to see how my results went and got the same behavior from QT. No errors, but also no video or sound. The video opened just fine in WinAmp but VLC said "this file is broken, do you want to repair it" when I tried. I approved the repair and the file then loaded. When I cancelled out of the repair the error message said "Unrecognized format"

I can't help but wonder if there is some sort of thing wrong with the original file. I don't have any wmv's around to try another test, but I would consider finding out if you have better results with a different original.

If you end up finding a solution I'd be interested in hearing what it was.