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Tips & Tricks: How to improve encoding quality

While the lesson aims to teach just how to convert a DVD to a CD sized WMV, there are many ways to improve output results and encoding quality. The options used in the tutorial where a good compromise between quality and speed. Here are some tips:

Increase the bit rate:
Giving higher bit rates is the fastest way to increase encoding quality. Using 90, 99 minutes or 2 CDs (or even more, but you may think about DVD at these sizes) will achieve this.

Also, you can lower audio or video bit rate in order to increase the other one. For example, while in the tutorial 96kbps were used for audio, you can choose a lower value, retaining good audio quality thanks to WMA excellent compression, Microsoft suggests to use 64Kbps. I suggest you to try various settings and choose those you feel adequate.

Use two pass encoding:
Using two pass (or dual pass) encoding is another technique.
While this won't require more bit rate in order to improve quality, it will take a first, content analysis pass before encoding, nearly doubling the required encoding time.
You can choose this option only on CBR mode, it will be active by default on VBR.

Use VBR mode encoding:
While more time consuming due to dual pass, VBR is the best way to improve your output quality.
VBR analyzes the input file and allocates more bit rate where is needed, instead of adjusting quality to a set bit rate.
There are two VBR modes, quality and bit rate VBR.
With quality VBR you will choose the output quality, letting the encoder doing the work. Note that there's no way to determine output size this way.
Bit Rate VBR (or ABR, Average Bit Rate) does a similar work, but it allows to determine final file size, as it will allocate the bit rate within the chosen limits, so that it's final size will be nearly the same of a CBR one, though visual quality will likely be better thanks to the optimization.

Use different Codecs:
Windows Media Encoder allows you to choose between different compression algorithms, or codecs.
Sometimes you may obtain better visual quality with the "older" WMV7 codec, while WMV8 is better at pure compression, and you will obtain smaller files with quality VBR.

WMV9 codec is mostly used for DVD authoring, and it's not a good choice for DVD compression in most cases as it requires at least a fast Pentium 4 or a dual CPU machine.

For audio, use WMA9 Professional if you allocate 128kbps or more, it will give you much better audio quality, and supports up to 7.1 surround and 24 bit 96khz resolution.

In the end, welcome in the WMV world!
If you use WMV for your personal multimedia contents and are a file swapping network user, place [WMV - (language)] before the content name in the filename, for example, [WMV-ENG] for English or [WMV-ITA] for Italian.