A friend of mine has some video that he'd like to encode so that he can email it to his family (who aren't particularly computer-literate).

I think the original source is a Sony DV cam, in HD. He's successfully transcoded it to MPEG2, but when he attempts to transcode that to WMV, the audio and video are no longer synchronised.

So can anyone recommend any Windows-based software that will transcode to WMV or another format commonly playable on Windows? He doesn't mind paying a reasonable amount, but wanted recommendations before spending money on something that's no better than the free stuff he's found so far...

VLC can't produce something useful?

Oh, yeah. Must be easy to use...

MPEG2 isn't easy enough to use?

He wants to email it - mpeg2 will be huge.

I use TmpgEnc Express to re-encode all my video. Theres a free 30 day trial and its simple enough to use (I think) and has a wmv option.

http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te4xp.html

What is he using currently? Has he simply tried Windows Media Encoder? I've used that for all WMV-HD encoding in the past and it works really well.

He could also try Super.

How about Google Video: https://upload.video.google.com/

He can just upload the MPEG2 there, and they will transcode it into a flash movie that he can then just e-mail them the link to. Google allows videos to be set private, so it won't come up in a random search.

Easy for him (click browse, click upload) and easy for them (click link in e-mail).

I don't see where you get that he wants low-quality flash video on the web. Besides, the uploader won't take a video larger than 100MB. That would have to be an extremely brief HD MPEG2 video.

Roger, what is the eventual purpose of this video. I assume that if he's taking this in HD, he wants something with decent quality. Is he trying to convert to WMV or WMV-HD?

It's video of his son, taken using an HD DV-cam, and he wants to make it available to the in-laws, who live in the US (he's in the UK). So, reasonable quality, not too big, but most of all it must be a standard Windows Media Player codec.

I don't think that Flash/Google/Youtube video is going to be good enough.

Main reason I had suggested Google or something similar is due to the e-mail comment in the first post. Anything sent via e-mail is going to have to be small. E-mail is not a file transfer mechanism, and as such, you never know what limits might be imposed between your e-mail client, your e-mail server, any server it passes through, the destination server, and the destination client.

Google video was just a quick suggestion, but I'm sure there are other higher quality services out there that can host it.

How about Vimeo?

How about mailing them a DVD?