The collection of Windows Live apps available for XP, Vista and Windows 7 is a grab bag of useful and useless (to me) apps that I’d avoided for some time since my last exposure to the collection in the Windows 7 Beta. But. I have a growing collection of unmanageably huge wtv files from Windows Media Center recordings, and wanted to burn the things to DVD in a usable format, so…
Of to the M$ Windows Live download site for the Windows Live Movie Maker Beta. Sure, it meant telling the installer app “Hell no!” when it wanted to install the crappy Windows Live mail and other useless junk, but the photo management app and Movie Maker (which, strangely, does not come in ANY version with Windows 7) were what I wanted to try out, so off to the races.
And with just a lil fumbling around, the Movie Maker Beta converted a wtv of the season premiere of Burn Notice to wmv format. OK enough, I suppose, for archiving. But it’s really, really slow and borked on me once, requiring a retry. Not only that, but the one-hour show is still more than a 3GB file size! What will I do with 2 hour shows? *mpph* Not good enough. Worse? “Editing” capabilities in the app are almost non-existant. Very “not good enough”.