Creating Windows Media Files

Our Multimedia SDK supports a wide variety of formats including Windows Media Format. Different version of the Windows Media Format work differently in terms of licensing (certificates), and profiles. Certificates are used to unlock the Windows Media support in the Windows Media 8 codec. The default system profiles use Windows Media 8 codec. The Windows Media 9 codec does not require unlocking, but it is not used in the default system profiles. You need to create a custom profile to use the Windows Media 9 encoder.

 

Profiles contain all the compression settings. They contain the following:

·        The name of the video and audio encoders.

·        The size of the video (by default, Windows media codec’s resize the video before compression)

·        The compression quality

 

There are two types of profiles:

1)      System (these are created and maintained by Microsoft). We do not control the system profiles. They use Windows Media 8, which are protected and require unlocking with a Certificate.

2)      Custom (these can be created by the user using our toolkit).

 

Since Windows Media 9 does not require you to unlock it, we recommend you use this version. Otherwise, you will have to obtain the appropriate license and unlock key from Microsoft.

 

The easiest way to create your own custom profiles is to use the Windows Media Profile Editor (WMProEdt.exe) that ships with the Windows Media 9 Encoder. It can be obtained form the link below. This tool is very straight forward and easy to use. This tool will create a profile file with a “.prx” extension. This file can be loaded in the toolkit using the ltmmWMProfileManager.LoadProfileByData Method. Please refer to the help file for more information and sample code using this method.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

 

If you want to create your profiles programmatically, you can use the ‘ltmmWMProfileManager.CreateEmptyProfile Method’. Please refer to the help file for more information and sample code using this method.

 

I have attached a simple C# application that creates a Windows Media 9 file using a sample profile created by the Windows Media Profile Editor.

 

keywords: WMV, ASF, Windows Media, profile, custom

Attached is an updated version of this sample C# project. The project now uses Visual Studio 2008 with LEADTOOLS Multimedia v17.5

Updated to LEADTOOLS v19 with Visual Studio 2017. Also changed project to automatically select dll's for running in 32-bit and 64-bit.
Extract folder to "C:\LEADTOOLS 19\Examples\DotNet\CS\" to use the example.

There is an included PRX file ("CS_CustomASFProfiles.prx") for testing, copy to the "LEADTOOLS Images" directory ("C:\Users\Public\Documents\LEADTOOLS Images\") before running.

Updated Project to LEADTOOLS Version 20 using Visual Studio 2019. This project is using the x86 Architect.