I have several WMV videos from 2004–2006. They play normally in standard video players, but visible corruption appears when I import them into any modern video editor. Parts of the image break up at specific timestamps, and on-screen text can become almost unreadable. The same glitches remain after transcoding with Shutter Encoder, whether using a lossless or lossy format, and they occur at exactly the same points. An old version of Windows Movie Maker can re-encode the files and remove the visible corruption, but it sometimes skips or duplicates frames and adds mild compression artifacts. What tools or workflow could properly decode or repair these files while preserving the original quality and frame timing?
5 Answers
FFmpeg is worth testing because it can handle timestamp and decoder issues that some GUI programs don’t. Start with a basic conversion such as `ffmpeg -i input.wmv output.mp4`, or explicitly use H.264 and AAC. If the problem is caused by bad timestamps, options such as `-fflags +igndts` and `-fflags +genpts` may help, although those are more relevant when the corruption is caused by timing metadata rather than damaged image data.
Do you know what device or software originally created the WMV files? That might explain why newer editors decode them differently. I’d try decoding them with VirtualDub or HandBrake, possibly converting to an AVI intermediate before importing them into your editor.
Another approach is to index the file with MeGUI and an AviSynth script, then open that script in VirtualDub. If the frames look correct there, export an intermediate file—ideally using a high-quality or lossless codec—and edit that version instead.
You could test another conversion pipeline, such as VidCoder or HandBrake, and encode directly to a modern format like H.264. Even though WMV is old, a different decoder may interpret the files more successfully.
Since Shutter Encoder already uses a similar conversion approach and the artifacts remain at the same timestamps, the issue may be in how the WMV frames themselves are decoded rather than in the output container. Try several independent decoders, especially VirtualDub/AviSynth, FFmpeg, or HandBrake, and compare the frame output before choosing an intermediate format.
I’ve already tested all of Shutter Encoder’s settings, so I’m trying the other decoding and indexing options now. I’ll compare the results at the affected timestamps.