Shoutbox

(Also posted on the Winamp.com Forums)

Hello!

Umm... does anyone know of a way to extract the audio stream out of a WMV file, without recompressing (re-encoding) it?

The audio codec is Windows Media Audio V8 (128 kbps, 44 kHz, stereo) and the video codec is Windows Media Video V7.

I tried Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Encoder 9 Series, both can't do it. I also tried VirtualDub and VirtualDubMod, but they both can't work with WMV files because of legal issues.

This thing seems so trivial, it's actually simpler to extract the compressed audio stream than decompress and compress it again. All you have to do is copy the audio data to a new file and add a header or something. You'd expect many apps to be capable of doing that... but no. They all have to recompress!

So why won't I recompress, you ask? Firstly, it just freakin' ticks me off having to do something that is entirely unnecessary (recompressing). Secondly, recompressing a lossy format is never a good thing to do, the quality degrades.

This is so frustrating... Please, come to my rescue.

Thanks a bunch!