Yesterday I drove out to Redmond (which can take anywhere from 25 minutes to 2 hours depending on traffic - actually made great time) to meet with Mike Torres and talk a bit about Windows Live Movie Maker, which was released as version 1.0 on a couple weeks ago.   I purposely travelled light, no laptop, no messes of wires, just a pocket sized video camera.  Not only did I want to talk about Movie Maker, I wanted to try it out, as many more people will be doing in the next weeks and months.

Since the demise of Soapbox, we've been scrambling a bit to get our hosting strategy in order, but as much as it pained us to do it, we thought the easiest thing would be to click on the YouTube upload link from within Movie Maker, grit our teeth, and use the "G-word".  Well that didn't go so well.

I had checked the video quality both from within Movie Maker and also on Windows Media Player locally, and did a quick spot check once the video finished processing, but to be honest I didn't watch it once it was up.  This morning I headed out for a few hours, and while I was out I started getting text messages, emails, direct twitter messages, and phone calls about the audio quality of the video.

Sure enough, the audio sync was all fouled up.  I tried uploading the video again, same issue.  I tried uploading using the YouTube uploader, same thing.  Tried a different .wmv video (one that hadn't been processed with Movie Maker), same audio sync problems.  Tried it from another computer (with a brand new Windows 7 install from Technet), same same same.  Searching on Bing for "youtube audio sync wmv" seemed to point to audio codec issues, meaning that, for me, on our LiveSide YouTube account, wmv files weren't working.

The video I edited using Windows Live Movie Maker is fine. There aren’t any problems with it viewed locally.   I've posted a self hosted Silverlight player version in the original post, and also posted it to our LiveSide Facebook page (by the way, log in and become a fan of LiveSide on Facebook, if you haven’t already!).  They both work fine (no guarantees on our self hosting bandwidth, though, but we should be ok).

UPDATE: Yay, figured out how to embed the Facebook video into a Community Server post :)

Google had its share of other problems today, and this looks like it’s a Google issue and not Movie Maker.  They are supposed to support .wmv files, so maybe this was just some weird glitch.  Still, what was supposed to be a fun exercise with Windows Live Movie Maker turned into a bit of a nightmare, and if success with YouTube can’t be guaranteed, maybe the upload link from Movie Maker shouldn’t be there in the first place.  Anyway, sorry for the bad experience, believe me it wasn’t near as bad as mine ;).