Digital Home Thoughts: WMV9 PowerToy: Small Name, Big Results

If you ever use Windows Movie Maker to create video files, here's a dirty little secret: Microsoft uses the fastest encoding process possible, which also results in the worst possible quality. I tend to use Windows Movie Maker for quick projects, not serious editing, but when I'm using it to trim out a segment of a TV show for permanent archiving, I want it to be as high-quality as possible. It always irked me that Windows Movie Maker had no options for quality vs. speed encoding (such as doing two-pass encoding) but I didn't realize what a problem this was until I saw what a different it made. How did I do that you might be asking? With WM9 PowerToy, a small application written by Alex Zambelli's, a developer who's something that Microsoft should have done: given us better quality encoding.



The tool is remarkably simple: you download the single EXE file, run it, check the box next to "Compression Optimization Preset", select "Best Visual Quality" from the drop-down menu, the click Apply. The next time you do an export from Windows Movie Maker, it will take much longer, but the quality will be much higher. I did a test with a TV show I'd recorded and the results were very obvious and made me regret all the encoding I'd done