That was a nice rant Dave but I think those of us looking for solutions to export wmv or avi files do want to provide that format. If exporting samples in two file formats increases the amount of viewers even by a small portion, that is very worthwhile for most of us and not worth shrugging off.

Dan

For the flip4mac settings I think I mentioned almost every option it gave me. I don't have the pro or studio version so there are not a pile of presets. The options I selected was the windows media standard (as opposed to advanced) 2 pass VBR with the rate set at 1000 (which make great videos in quicktime..). For the audio I used the WMstandard as well, but audio isn't a concerns as it plays and sounds fine. Can somebody post 'good' settings they use in flip4mac to get reasonable sized files but great looking video as well.

Not a rant, just cold hard experience.

The Popwire and Flip for Mac options are excellent solutions for .wmv since microsoft has never offered one.

.AVIs can be exported in most codecs right out of any QT app. It's not the .mov or .avi file extensions that are the problem. Both are wrappers for numerous different codecs. Practise with bitrate and compression settings will yield the best settings to work for any given producer working for any given client.

Occassionally I have to export to .wmv for my windows clients (most of our clients are windows users) but it's very rare. The others have no problem simply updating their version of QT for windows to a recent version.

Since the vast majority of pc users have QT already installed, there usually is not a problem, in my experience.

microsoft dropped the windows media player for the mac because less than 3% of the computers on the internet are macs... which proves that there is no logical reason to put quicktime video clips up on your website.

there are at least 900 million pc's on the 'net, and less than half of 'em have qt installed... very few of those will play h.264 quicktime clips.

this month i served up about 100 gigs of video... over 10,000 clips... not one single request for quicktime; in fact, i don't think that i've ever had anyone ask for quicktime.

patrick, are you encoding wmv 9 video, and wmv 9.1 audio? you don't want the wmv 8 stuff... are you using the 320x240 frame size? what is your framerate? you should be able to do the native 30fps at the video bitrate you specified.