How to get better quality converting MP4 to WMV with ffmpeg?

Question

I am converting MP4 files to WMV with these two rescaling commands:

ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:360 test1.wmv
ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:720 test2.wmv

I've also tried:

ffmpeg -g 1 -b 16000k -i test1.mp4 test1.wmv

However, the .wmv files that are produced are "blocky and grainy" as you can see here in a small section of a video screenshot:

These are the sizes:

test.mp4 - 106 MB
test1.wmv - 6 MB
test2.wmv - 16 MB

How can I increase the quality/size of the resulting .wmv files (the size of the .wmv files is of no concern)?

Answer 1

Consider the following command instead (some outdated commands in the final answer section):

ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -c:v wmv2 -b:v 1024k -c:a wmav2 -b:a 192k test1.wmv

REFERENCES

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/352920/fastest-way-to-convert-videos-batch-or-single