There are a few limitations to the supportability of the Windows Media Encoder 9 series application and SDK. Microsoft has extended support for this product for the next year or so. Hopefully if you are reading this you are aware of the next generation of the Encoder named the Expression Encoder. We are now on version 2 of the Expression Encoder and I would highly recommend that you take a look at it if you haven't already. We still have a large WM Encoder user base and the Expression Encoder is just starting to come into its own. This is the main reason why the WM Encoder support has been extended. I had the opportunity to talk to the Expression Encoder development manager the other day and we can expect about 85% feature parity between the WM Encoder and Expression Encoder with the release of Expression Encoder 3. This is as close as we are going to get. From what I understand we won't get 100% feature parity between the two products. However, the Expression Encoder will do a lot of stuff that the WM Encoder won't do. The Expression Encoder also has a full object model and SDK as of version 2, so it is fully programmable (although there are some issues with using VB .net that should be addressed in v2 SP1).