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[Shadowen]

I love being able to convert audio files between all of the different formats.  Could similar support be added to Media Center for video formats as well?  I would like to be able to convert between formats such as AVI, MPG, and WMV.

[sraymond]

Converting video would seem much more difficult than converting audio...  

Why do you want to convert the video?  I'd think once someone settles on a codec that provides good results there would be quite a tradeoff in transcoding to another codec.  I don't know of anything that can do it in real time, either.  And going from one lossy codec to another lossy codec seems strange.

Have you tried programs such as Virtualdub, which seems to be one of the best in its class?

Oh, and AVI isn't a format (aka codec) - it's a "container".

Scott-

[Shadowen]

I want to be able to perform this conversion/encoding for many reasons.

One which comes to mind is that I keep wmv files of tv shows on my computer at either 640X480, or 320x240 resolution with a very high bit rate.  But if I want to transfer those shows to my Pocket PC and watch them on its' media player, I have to re-encode them at a lower resolution that will display, and at a bit-rate that will fit on my Pocket PC storage card.  

Currently, I have to load the file into Windows Movie Maker, and resave the movie to another location with the new encoding but this is a pain because I would like to be able to do this from my media player of choice, Media Center.

[sraymond]

OK,

So you're not talking about transcoding from one codec to another, but rather downgrading the resolution for a specific codec.

And you want to do it "server-side" (i.e. where MC is installed) vice client side (i.e. the PocketPC) because you don't want to have to transfer (and store) the full-resolution AVI.  That's interesting...  I can see where it is useful for Pocket devices with reduced storage.

I wonder if JRiver could add this functinality for their own codec - or if there's even much of a demand.