AVI, which stands for Audio Video Interleave, is the most common format for audio and video data on the computer. It is a special case of the RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format). AVI is Microsoft’s reply to Apple’s QuickTime technology. WMV, on the other hand, stands for Windows Media, and this is the generic name for Microsoft’s video-encoding solutions, which doesn’t necessarily define the technologies that it uses.
Converting AVI to WMV involves the following steps:
1. Launch the River Past Video Cleaner application. Then fire up the video cleaner.
2. Click on the “Add File” button on the toolbar, after which the standard “File open” dialog box will appear. Then, you may select AVI in its file of type in the Combo box.
3. Select the file you would like to convert, and click on “Open.” The file will then be added o the conversion list. AVI is a file container format and may employ a standard Windows codec or some other third-party codecs, in which case that codec has to be installed on your system for River Past Audio Converter to decode the file.
4. In the event that you get an error message while opening the AVI file, try opening the same file in Windows Media Player to see whether you can play it with audio. If you are unsuccessful in doing so, then you will need to find the audio compression is used in the file and download the codec.
5. Likewise, if you are unable to add the AVI file, then it is possible that the file may contain video and audio that uses codecs that have not been installed in your system. This can be verified by playing the files in Windows Media Player. If Windows Media Player cannot play the file, that’s an indication that the codecs are missing; the only solution then is to find the codecs that are used to encode the AVI, after which you may install them.
6. It is a good idea to install ffdShow, which is compatible with many video compressions, including DivX and Xvid. For the audio, you may install the AC-3 Decoder Filter. You may also install CoreAAC as an alternative.
7. The next step is the selection of the output format. The Settings panel at the bottom of the window is the one used to control the output format. To expand the panel, click on the toggle on the left of the “Output Format” and select WMV as the file type. Please note that to convert to WMV files, you will need to have Windows Media Format 9 runtime installed.
8. Click on the toggle on the left of the video settings label in order to expand the panel. Select “Specify” under “Size” and/or “Frame Rate” to enter the video resolution or the frame rate. The encoding mode is set to “Quality” by default. The higher the quality settings, the larger the file. To control the file size, change the mode to “Constant bit rate.”
9. Click on the toggle on the left of the “Audio Settings” and select the audio compressor for the conversion.
10. Select the output directory by first expanding the “Output Directory Channel” and then finally click on the “Convert” button on the toolbar to convert the file.
