Windows Media Video (WMV) isn't supposed to be an editable format. It's a lossy, compressed format for final viewing after all the editing has been done. Furthermore, Microsoft discourages the editing of WMV files, in order to create a strong digital rights management climate; more content owners are likely to encode their content in WMV if they're reasonably sure that their work won't be hacked, extracted, or altered.

But some situations beg for WMV editing. Even with high-speed connections, you really don't want to send raw video if you can help it; relatively short clips can be hundreds of megabytes. Using WMV is an excellent way to get file sizes down to reasonable levels while retaining watchable quality.

We ran into just such a situation at ExtremeTech when two of our West Coast staffers got a chance to ride a Segway Human Transporter. They shot digital video, which we wanted to put on the ExtremeTech site. We needed to do the editing and uploading in our New York production department, and the raw files would have taken hours to upload and download via our FTP server. E-mailing them was out of the question, and we didn't want to wait for shipping. So the California crew encoded them as WMV and sent them off. That's when the fun began.

Unsupported File Type

We wanted only to do a light edit on the files, and we were mildly surprised that Adobe Premiere couldn't import WMV format. As we began searching for a suitable editor, we discovered that nothing can edit WMV; although several products used to have that ability, the companies removed it at Microsoft's behest. Robyn Peterson, senior producer at ExtremeTech, began a quest for a solution. The search took some surprising twists and turned up a cool file-conversion utility that you should know about.

Our goal was to convert the WMV file to AVI, which we could then edit in Premiere. Some online searching turned up a promising freeware product called VirtualDub (http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net). VirtualDub has some amazing capabilities, but WMV import isn't one of them—thanks to Microsoft.

Robyn's next attempt was with AsfTools, which could open and convert WMV files, but the program informed us, "Since the original file is encoded in WMV2, you may have trouble opening the AVI." It did not lie.