A quick edition of lost & found on how to use FFmpeg on WSL to create audio files that can be used for Skype for Business announcements. And an observation about the recently published security baseline for Windows 10 1809 and Server 2019.
FFmpeg
According to it’s website, FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created.
Packages are available for various operating systems but since Ubuntu runs just fine on Windows 10, I started using linux-style command-line tools in the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Check if you are running the latest version using ffmpeg -version or install to tool using sudo apt-get install ffmpeg.
According to @greiginsydney a 16 kHz, mono, 16-bit Wave file is recommended for best performance.
To convert an MP3 file to Wave with the above specifications, we can use something like this:
ffmpeg -i Downloads/ringtone.mp3 -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 1 -ar 16000 ringtone.wav
Security Baseline
Microsoft recently released the draft of the security baseline configuration for RS5 builds, that’s Windows 10 v1809 and Windows Server 2019. You can find more information about that on the Security Guidance blog, I just wanted to share a quick note for the Office 365 Admins out there:
The security baseline configuration contains a setting to disable Basic Authentication for the WinRM client. After applying the baseline configuration, I was no longer able to connect to Exchange Online or Skype for Business Online remote PowerShell Sessions as they rely on basic authentication.
Set the following configuration to Not Configured on your admin machines:
Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Remote Management (WinRM)\WinRM Client\Allow Basic authentication
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