Capture video streams & encode to WMV on Vista/7?

[wtmonroe]

Hello,

I work at an educational institution that has relied upon Windows Movie Maker 2.1 (WMM2.1) on to capture and encode video streams on PCs running XP. Basically, we had a camera with a composite audio/video output that was then converted with a small USB analog/DV converter. WMM2.1 then recognized the video stream and then captured/encoded it to a WMV file. The end result was a WMV file at ~400Kbps that we could provide to our students.

Neither the version of WMM that comes with Vista (WMM6) nor the version MS released (WMM2.6) for those whose graphics cards didn't effectively run MM6 support video stream capture. It appears that this won't change under versions of WMM in Windows 7.

A detailed series of articles explains the differences between the various versions of WMM and how they run on XP/Vista/7. There's also an interesting description of how to install WMM2.1 on Vista that will permit video capture. However, it involves altering some DLLs. I'm not sure this will work for us across our 15 classrooms.

http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/vide...22658.aspx

Our challenge is to find a way to capture (not import) and encode a video stream from our cameras to WMV using relatively easy-to-use software like WMM. At this point though I'm willing to entertain just about anything that will accomplish capturing/encodiing and then worry about how to train our students and faculty later.

If anyone has any experience capturing/encoding to WMV on Vista/7 I would really appreciate your input.

Regards,

W. Monroe