Crash when loading/encoding video by Windows Media Encoder

If you are a Zune Lover and want to use some free stuff to make high quality WMVs for your Zunes, you may have the same problem with me – after you make a avi backup of your DVD and want to convert it to WMV then put it to your Zune, wmencoder just crashed and report something like “faulting module wmenceng.dll” in event log. (BTW, Zune player program does not do an excellent job for my video collections, esp. the old ones – I used to be an video encoding fan years ago)

No matter you are using GUI or the command line script(WMCmd.vbs), the result is the same.

So what happened?

The problem is caused by incompatibility  of wmencoder and your Video/Audio codec. Some of the 3rd party DirectShow decoders interface are poorly written, therefore created abnormal streams that wmencoder cannot identify(you may ask the question that why it crashes instead of reporting an error, well, crash sometimes is better to prevent further attack).  Most of the time, this is caused by some certain version of "ffdshow”.

So if you are suffering from this problem, first, reinstall or find another build of ffdshow, or just modify settings in your ffdshow configuration interface to make sure it won’t decode certain streams, like mp3.

Then, problem solved.

And – if you are on Vista, don’t forget to apply the vista patch of windows media encoder, otherwise it won’t work at all.