Q. Do the Compatibility Lists of the Expression Encoder 2 and Movie Maker 6 in Vista show the same items?
A. No, on my Vista Ultimate system, the list in Expression Encoder 2 had 18 items at the same time the list in Movie Maker 6 had only one, and that line item wasn’t one of those in the Encoder’s list. They are clearly different lists.
Q. Under the Compatibility List at the left is a checkmark to allow hardware acceleration… or when unchecked not to. What has that to do with the filters and codecs in the list?
A. Nothing. The help documentation that comes with the Encoder says it’s something to toggle if wmv or MPEG2 files are causing you playback issues, like not being able to preview a job. If the issues are due to your video driver, turning off hardware acceleration might resolve it but at reduced performance. This issue is independent of the filters being used.
If turning off hardware acceleration helps, check to see if there’s a newer version of your video driver available.
Q. You’ve mentioned in many articles that each frame doesn’t always show up when viewing files in players or video editing software. Does the Expression Encoder 2 show each frame when previewing the inputs or outputs? I realize this question doesn’t relate to the Compatibility List.
A. When I started doing videos my magnifying glass could see each frame of a film, so I could confidently count frames. But things are different in the digital environment. I often wonder if a frame is missing or is it that the player can’t see it. My checks show the Encoder doesn’t show them all.
Here’s a link to my test file if you want to check it on your system. Different computers often provide different results. It’s a DV-AVI file with each of its 100 frames clearly numbered. Extract it from the zip file and do your checking.
http://www.papajohn.org/video/100NumberedFrames.zip
Let me know which frames you see or don’t and we can compare notes.