Expression Encoder 2(/API) Audio Limitations
When it was announced that Expression Studio 2 had gone RTM , I noticed on Frank Arrigo's blog, that the Expression Encoder (xEncoder from hereon in) had an API! (Side note, if you follow the Franks blog to the Expression Encoder Object Model post by the xEncoder team, please be aware that the API has changed since Beta 2, so if you're using RTM and it fails to compile, you just need to change a few names around)
I was initial excited, because I've been rather disenchanted with Handbrake which I've been trying to use since Jeff Atwood went on about it, and how he uses it to archive his DVD collection. While Expression Encoder won't allow you to directly encode a DVD, but working a bit of magic I've managed to create a system to encode DVD's to WMV's (VC1), but I'll save that for another time.
There are a few rather serious problems with using xEncoder or its API. For a start, you can't really really join an audio and video stream together. While this may seem harmless enough, when you combine it with the other faults, it grows in annoyance. The main problem I've noticed so far is that xEncoder can not do anything but stereo audio.
"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out"
In the main Encoder GUI, there is a drop down box for Audio Channels, which only exposes Stereo; if you are using the API, you can set your MediaItems to have an AudioProfile. That AudioProfile has a Channels property (Int), but if it is set to anything above or below 2, my test program would simply crash!
Hopefully xEncoder v2.5 or v3 adds multichannel support, otherwise the API for xEncoder is really of no benefit over the older Windows Media Encoder (WME), which multichannel! The xEncoder API requires xEncoder to be installed which unlike WME, is not free, cannot join audio and video together, and cant handle multichannel audio. (edit, fixed, thanks Will)