Last month, we covered a developmental feature in the Advanced Paste tool of PowerToys. Along with the usual text and other features, Microsoft said it was planning to convert media files into different formats using AI. Now, the media transcoding is available to all the users in the stable version with version 0.89.

You get two new options Transcode to .mp3 and Transcode to .mp4(H.264/AAC). Last month, we only got a glimpse of what the feature could do by referencing a few official screenshots. The implementation isn’t wildly different from what we thought and we did a few experiments with it.

How does the Transcode audio/video feature work?

If you don’t know how Advanced Paste works, here’s a brief explanation. It can perform actions on any file that you copy and then copy back the result to your clipboard. For example, you can convert text to different formats, convert images to text, and more.

For media transcoding, we downloaded a game trailer video from YouTube, a clip that is less than two minutes long. We copied and pasted it into the Advanced Paste box (you can launch it by pressing Win + Shift + V). You can click on either of the options to convert the file into audio or video format.

The UI showed a loading bar and extracted the audio file instantly. After that, we pasted the file into a folder and then played the audio to check its quality and size. The file size was under 2MB for a 22MB file. Similarly, we tried with a bigger 230MB clip, and the conversion yielded an 18MB mp3 file.

We even tried different file types like MKV and OPUS and both of these conversions happened without an issue. Converting a 200MB MKV file produced an 189MB MP4 file, so there isn’t a huge degree of compression.

However, we encountered a block while converting a 500MB+ MKV file. It showed an error with no details about what was wrong at our end.

Does PowerToys transcoding need an API key?

No. We first added our Open AI key, thinking that the feature needed it, but that wasn’t the case. You can convert files easily without entering the key.

The feature works offline and locally on your PC. Turning off the internet had no effect on the conversion access or speed. Just upgrade to version 0.89 and convert any video or audio file locally from now on.

You can try the feature by downloading PowerToys from the Microsoft Store.

The post Hands on with Windows 11’s feature that uses AI to extract audio from videos and more appeared first on Windows Latest