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Microsoft's iMovie alternative arrives in the form of Windows Live Movie Maker

by Parm Mann on 20 August 2009, 10:38

Tags: Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

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Microsoft's Windows Live team has announced today that the first complete release of Windows Live Movie Maker is now available to download as part of the free Windows Live Essentials suite.

Windows Live Movie Maker, designed as a replacement for the Windows Movie Maker bundled with Microsoft's Vista operating system, first arrived in beta form as part of the Windows Live Wave 3 release in September 2008. The all-new final release revamps the software with much improved functionality and an interface optimised for Windows 7.

Microsoft has described the software as "the one-minute way to turn photos and videos into great-looking movies that are easy to share - for free," and the release will be seen as a head-on competitor to the iMovie application bundled with all new Apple Mac computers.

Windows Live Movie Maker - available to Windows Vista and Windows 7 users only - hopes to capture a share of the web-based video-sharing phenomenon, and includes built-in uploading to popular services such as YouTube.

What's useful is that the software supports a wide range of video/audio formats, with Windows 7 users receiving added support for previously incompatible formats such as QuickTime .mov and .qt, AVCHD and MPEG-4.

The software's key features are being demonstrated at moviemakerpreview.com, and the entire Windows Live Essentials suite is available to download at get.live.com.

HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by Faiakes - Thu 20 Aug 2009 10:56
Is there a link of the full list of codecs and containers supported?
Microsoft is poor in supporting open source and xvid, mkv support is just too important :)
Posted by TheAnimus - Thu 20 Aug 2009 11:36
as long as the codec is installed it should work?

MS have this attitude that everyone should just use their wmv/wma (the latter i hate to admit it but is good, i still use flac on a principle of device fidelity, which is just stupid….. </diversion rant>)

But MS since the dawn of their multimedia layer have been very good at making it easy to plug in any codec you want, Windows Movie Maker could always save to anything you had a dec for. Thou i doubt they will budle it (and with good reason, un-surprisingly i've found WMV more stable than the others).

A better question is what happens if you've got a loverly graphics card, will it be leveraged at all? Will we have to wait for the new directx!

We could actually have an intresting debate about where codecs should live, should they be user mode? How abstracted should they be, how do you handle hardware acceleration?
Posted by Faiakes - Thu 20 Aug 2009 11:41
TheAnimus
as long as the codec is installed it should work?

MS have this attitude that everyone should just use their wmv/wma (the latter i hate to admit it but is good, i still use flac on a principle of device fidelity, which is just stupid….. </diversion rant>)

But MS since the dawn of their multimedia layer have been very good at making it easy to plug in any codec you want, Windows Movie Maker could always save to anything you had a dec for. Thou i doubt they will budle it (and with good reason, un-surprisingly i've found WMV more stable than the others).

A better question is what happens if you've got a loverly graphics card, will it be leveraged at all? Will we have to wait for the new directx!

We could actually have an intresting debate about where codecs should live, should they be user mode? How abstracted should they be, how do you handle hardware acceleration?
Well, I use both the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack (with Media Player Classic HC) and Avidemux 2.

Hence, the codecs are in the system but my video editor uses its own. Avidemux2 is the only video editor I have found which can handle (H.264) mkvs.

When I do upgrade to Win7 I might give it a try and let people know if the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack allows Windows Live Movie Maker to become useful (unless someone wants to try it now and let us know :))