Windows Media Encoder

» see microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

For about ten years the file extension on my side of a Turkish internet connection was .wmv. Not because anyone preferred it but because it was the one that opened. A .mov wanted QuickTime, a .rm wanted RealPlayer and an argument with a nag screen, and an .avi wanted a codec pack of uncertain provenance that you installed at your own risk. A .wmv double-clicked and played. Somebody had to make those files, and the thing they used was a free download from Microsoft that most of the people watching had never heard of.

Windows Media Encoder got its name in October 1999, when Microsoft retired the NetShow brand across the whole product line and relabeled everything Windows Media. The encoder inherited the job NetShow Encoder had been doing since 1998. It went through version 4.0 and 7.1 and a stopgap called the Windows Media 8 Encoding Utility in March 2001, and then on 15 November 2002 Microsoft shipped 9 Series and essentially stopped. The last stable build is dated 7 January 2003. An x64 edition followed in September 2005 and that was the end of the development history.

It never cost anything. That is the part that explains the reach: Microsoft was not selling an encoder, it was seeding a format, and the tool was the seed. Every conference recording, every university lecture page, every Turkish forum post with a video attachment in those years came out of somebody running this on a desktop and uploading whatever it produced.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was for ~

The advertised job was encoding: take live audio and video off a capture card, or take a file you already had, and write Windows Media. Underneath that were the parts that made it good software. Two-pass encoding and variable bitrate, both of which mattered enormously when your audience was on 56k and every kilobit was a decision. A profile editor for building your own bitrate targets. A stream editor. Automation through VBScript, so a server could be told to encode without a human touching it.

The feature that outlived its own context was screen capture. Windows Media Encoder would record your desktop to video, with a codec tuned specifically for screen content rather than for moving pictures, and it did this years before screencasting was a word anybody used. A large share of the early software tutorials on the web exist because this was sitting free on a Microsoft download page and someone pressed record.

~ the codec war ~

The encoder was one end of a strategy. At the other end was Windows Media Player, preinstalled, and in between was a format Microsoft controlled outright. RealNetworks had owned streaming since 1995 and monetized the player; Microsoft gave the player away, gave the encoder away, and made money on the operating system underneath both. It worked, and by the early 2000s Windows Media had taken most of what Real had.

Then the industry standardized. Windows Media Video 9 was submitted to SMPTE and became VC-1, which was a genuine technical win and a strategic dead end, because H.264 arrived at the same time with everybody else behind it. Once Flash Video and then HTML5 settled on H.264, a proprietary format with a proprietary DRM layer had nothing left to offer a publisher.

~ the long fade ~

Microsoft's replacement was Expression Encoder, which shipped inside Expression Studio from 2007 and eventually did the H.264 work that Windows Media Encoder could not. Microsoft discontinued the entire Expression line on 20 December 2012, so the successor was formally dead more than two years before the thing it succeeded.

Windows Media Encoder 9 Series ran out its clock on the lifecycle page instead. Mainstream support ended on 13 January 2010, extended support on 14 January 2015, and neither date came with an announcement, because by then there was nobody left to announce it to. The real end came in May 2017: the Windows 10 Anniversary Update stripped out Windows Media DRM, and a fifteen-year-old encoder that had shipped hundreds of millions of files stopped being able to start on the operating system it was written for.

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