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!

Errr... if I understand correctly what you want to do... you can extract the audio on Wav, Mp3, another WMA or many other audio formats from a Windows Media file (wma/wmv/asf...) with DBpoweramp

Thanks 'FD, but I'm afraid that's no good.... That program does two things:

- Decompresses (decodes) the audio stream from the WMV file using a WMA codec, which produces a Wave file;
- Compresses (encodes) the raw audio stream using a codec and format of my choice.

I don't want that. It involves recompressing a lossy data stream, which degrades its quality. What I want is a program that does this:

- Extracts the compressed (encoded) WMA audio stream from the video file without decoding it, and saves it to a new WMA file (with an appropriate file header, I suppose).

Oh, I get it

Well, apart from extracting it to a wav, I can't think of any way to split up the audio from the video without losing quality after recompressing it

I doubt the quality would suffer that much, would it?

I don't think that it would.

quote:

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Originally posted by M-Head
I doubt the quality would suffer that much, would it?

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I don't either, but Sock's like that

Blah....

Any audiophile will tell you that recompressing data that's been compressed using a lossy codec is a bad idea. The quality will always degrade somewhat (depending on how you recompress the data and how it was compressed before). But even if you take an MP3 that's compressed at 64 KBPS and recompress it at 320 KBPS, the quality will not improve. The source compression can never be exceeded by the new one, and is most likely to be in better quality.

And besides, it's such a waste! Why degrade the quality? Why decompress the audio, and then compress it again?? Why?!? It's already there, perfectly compressed!

Well anyway, it looks like no software can do it (stupid WMV!), so I guess I'm forced to recompress...

I know, but is the quality loss really that noticable?

When I rip CD's to 192kbps MP3's so I can listen to them on my comp I don't notice any difference. So the quality reduction really shouldn't be anywhere near noticeable...man sock you're a perfection freak!