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Hi all, As part of the schools digital media sections of IT the students have to capture and edit video – since the IT Teachers want to stick with XP Movie Maker (which I understand because of its simplicity for the year 7/8/9 students) we are constantly running into problems with video file formats not being supported. Usually if a student had some video that couldn’t be edited I would stick it into SUPER and re render the video on my desktop PC however with the volume of video this can sometimes take quite a while. As such I was thinking does anyone know of a way that I could get one of the servers to automatically render the video for me? The way I see this working (or something similar)- 1. Student finds they can’t use video in movie maker 2. Student cops video file to a network shared folder 3. Every few minutes the server looks at that folder to see if there is anything in there 4. Server converts video and puts it in a ‘rendered videos’ network folder 5. Server s deletes original video from folder (maybe even deletes the rendered video after a specific time period) What would be even better is if this could also be done with music files to. I know this is a tall order and I’d be happy to have a go at anything. If I need to run a separate OS (or even Linux) to do this then that shouldn’t be a problem as we have plenty of RAM in our virtual server. Thanks, James

First things first – Why would I want to do this? With the sheer number of devices out there all using different file formats for video you may sometimes come across a video format that cannot be played/edited in Windows; setting up a video rendering server can help solve this by converting the video into a nice .wmv format. This article has been together with advice from a number of EduGeek users (see this thread for the helpers) and a little bit of blind luck; as with all processes there are many ways to go about it and this is just one way. Software needed- Microsoft Windows – Any copy should work fine but I’m using Windows 7 running inside a virtual machine Microsoft Expression Encoder v2 (doesn’t work with higher versions as they don’t support command line) Directory Monitor from deventerprise.net (its free!) Notepad (or your fav .bat editor) Something to take note of- Video rendering is processor intensive and can consume a tone of your system resources, think carefully about how/where you want to run this as it could seriously muck things up (performance wise). The meat- 1. Install Expression Encoder and Directory Monitor 2. Create a share on your rendering PC with two subfolders named ‘Input’, ‘Output’ and ‘Scripts’ 3. Apply security settings for users to write/read to input, to read from output 4. Apply security settings to Scripts so that the local user (or whoever is going to be logged into your rendering server) can read (let everyone else read the folder too if you like to show the script) 5.Create a bat file with the following code and put it in scripts – @echo off & setlocal ENABLEEXTENSIONS :: Call Functions call :GetTime h n s t call :GetDate y m d :: Wait (for file to upload) echo just gonna wait for the file to upload choice /d y /t 60 > nul echo that should be done! time to get going again :: Convert video "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 2\encoder.exe" /source %1 /target "c:\encode\video\output\%h%-%n%-%s%_%y%-%m%-%d%.wmv" :: Delete origional file del %1 :: Exit goto :EOF ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :GetTime hh nn ss tt :: :: By: Ritchie Lawrence, updated 2007-05-12. Version 1.3 :: :: Func: Loads local system time components into args 1 to 4. :: For NT4/2000/XP/2003 :: :: Args: %1 Var to receive hours, 2 digits, 00 to 23 (by ref) :: %2 Var to receive minutes, 2 digits, 00 to 59 (by ref) :: %3 Var to receive seconds, 2 digits, 00 to 59 (by ref) :: %4 Var to receive centiseconds, 2 digits, 00 to 99 (by ref) ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: setlocal ENABLEEXTENSIONS for /f "tokens=5-8 delims=:,. " %%a in ('echo/^|time') do ( set hh=%%a&set nn=%%b&set ss=%%c&set cs=%%d) if 1%hh% LSS 20 set hh=0%hh% endlocal&set %1=%hh%&set %2=%nn%&set %3=%ss%&set %4=%cs%&goto :EOF ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :GetDate yy mm dd :: :: By: Ritchie Lawrence, 2002-06-15. Version 1.0 :: :: Func: Loads local system date components into args 1 to 3. :: For NT4/2000/XP/2003. :: :: Args: %1 var to receive year, 4 digits (by ref) :: %2 var to receive month, 2 digits, 01 to 12 (by ref) :: %3 Var to receive day of month, 2 digits, 01 to 31 (by ref) ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: setlocal ENABLEEXTENSIONS set t=2&if "%date%z" LSS "A" set t=1 for /f "skip=1 tokens=2-4 delims=(-)" %%a in ('echo/^|date') do ( for /f "tokens=%t%-4 delims=.-/ " %%d in ('date/t') do ( set %%a=%%d&set %%b=%%e&set %%c=%%f)) endlocal&set %1=%yy%&set %2=%mm%&set %3=%dd%&goto :EOF ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Take note of the ‘Convert video’ section – you may need to change the Expression Encoder and Source paths depending on your setup! 6. Start Directory Monitor and add a shortcut to it in your start up files (to load it automatically if you need to reboot). 7. Use it to monitor any new files being created in your input folder and then run the .bat script in ‘Scripts’. You can also modify the time that the application looks to the folder for new files from the settings menu. 8. Deposit a test video into Input, the video encoder should detect it, run the script (which will wait for a few seconds for the video to finish uploading), convert the video and put it in your output folder and then delete the source video. You might also wish to consider running some kind of script (maybe in scheduled tasks) to empty the output folder of its contents every now and again to save you doing this manually. Right that’s it do enjoy