While at PDC08 I managed to capture a fair amount of video footage.
I spent a good part of today trying to convert it to a usable format. I wasted a ridiculous amount of time and effort trying to get Windows Movie Maker to work. This is an incredibly frustrating piece of crapware, not only does it not work well (for me at least) since it kept throwing exceptions and crashing... but it also can't be downloaded except via Windows Update and can't be uninstalled via any normal method (Add/Remove Programs) so I wasn't even able to repair my installation. I'm stuck with this garbage on my machine.
I managed to actually convert ONE video (that of Alan Stevens) before it started repeatedly crashing. Unfortunately, in spite of much searching for answers or workarounds, I never could get WMM working properly again.
While chatting with the aforementioned Alan Stevens, he suggested I give Expression Encoder a try. After some fiddling and tweaking, I'm happy to say this has produced excellent results. I've converted about half of my videos so far and I'm gradually uploading them to Soapbox.
Now if only I could get around the 100meg (per file) limitation on Soapbox.
Fwiw, Soapbox works GREAT with LiveWriter since I can just link to my videos directly from within my blogposts. LiveWriter logs in and lets me pick the videos with just a couple clicks. very nice.