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What to do with an .mswmm file

An .mswmm file is a project saved by the Windows Movie Maker that came with Windows XP (versions 2.0 and 2.1) or Windows Vista (2.6 and 6.0). Like every Movie Maker project it is a set of instructions, not a video: the list of photos, clips and music the movie used, in order, with the trims, transitions, effects and titles. The media itself stayed in its own files.

Nothing Microsoft ships today opens one, and the later Windows Live Movie Maker cannot read the XP version directly. A Microsoft Q&A answer from 2013 puts it plainly: "There is no way to directly read that format in Windows Live Movie Maker."

Look for the finished movie first

If anyone ever chose "Save Movie File" (XP) or "Publish Movie" (Vista), there is a .wmv somewhere, often in My Videos and named after the project. That file is the movie, with everything in it. Search the old drive for *.wmv before going further.

What is inside the file

I opened 26 .mswmm projects to work this out: 16 real projects people have shared on the Internet Archive, saved by Movie Maker 2.1 and 2.6, and ten small test projects saved by Movie Maker 6.0 that Julian Heinzel published with his libmswmm project.

An .mswmm is a Microsoft compound file, the same container old Word .doc files use. Inside are thumbnails of each clip, a Windows shortcut to each media file, and the project itself as XML in a stream called ProducerData\Producer.Dat. Each media file appears there as SrceFn="..." with a path such as @:Desktop\outside pic 1.jpg or @:MyDocs\Camtasia Studio\bbros.avi. The @: part is Movie Maker's shorthand for a folder in the user's profile (Desktop, My Documents, My Pictures and so on), so the path still means something after a move to another PC with another user name.

Listing the photos and clips it used

The XML is stored as UTF-16 text, which is why Notepad shows the project with gaps between the letters. PowerShell reads it properly. Change the path and paste this in:

$t = [IO.File]::ReadAllText("C:\Old projects\holiday.MSWMM", [Text.Encoding]::Unicode)
[regex]::Matches($t, 'SrceFn="([^"]+)"') | ForEach-Object { $_.Groups[1].Value } | Sort-Object -Unique

It prints every file the project points to. I ran it over all 26 projects; the biggest listed 292 files. Then search for those names the same way as for any other project; recovering the photos and music has the places worth looking.

Opening it in an old Movie Maker

Movie Maker 2.6 and 6.0 both open .mswmm projects. According to the same Microsoft Q&A answer, 2.6 and 6.0 read projects from 2.1, and another answer from 2016 adds that a 6.0 project can be opened in Movie Maker 2009 to 2012, so 6.0 can act as a bridge to the Movie Maker 2012 that still installs on Windows 11. Save a new copy at each step, because a project saved by a newer version no longer opens in the older one.

Where to get them: the Internet Archive has Movie Maker 2.6 as a single installer at archive.org/details/movie-maker-2.6_classic. I downloaded it on 25 October 2026: Movie Maker 2.6.msi, 7,362,560 bytes, version 2.6.4037.0, with a valid Microsoft Corporation signature. The 6.0 copies there are another matter. The one I checked is labelled "Movie Maker 6.0 for Windows 7" and has no signature at all, which means someone rebuilt it; PCWorld reported in July 2026 that a 6.0 setup from the archive works on Windows 10 and 11, but I would only run an unsigned installer in a virtual machine.

I have not run either on Windows 11 myself. With the project open and its files found, File, Save Movie File (or Publish Movie in 6.0) writes a WMV, which any converter turns into an MP4.

Without Movie Maker, in the browser

Slideback reads .mswmm projects from Movie Maker 2.x and 6.0. Drop the file on the Movie Maker page and it lists every file the project uses; choose the folder they are in now and it matches them by name, @: paths included. Then it plays the movie with every clip at the time Movie Maker saved, the trims and speed changes, the transitions, the titles and credits, the music and each clip's own sound. The check and the preview are free, and saving the MP4 is US$19 once.

Not everything comes back exactly. Shatter, page curl and a few other transitions play as something simpler. Film age, film grain, watercolor and the other artistic effects are left off, title animations play as a fade (credits scroll), and sound turned up past twice its level plays at twice. The page lists what applies to your project before you pay. The bigger catch is the video itself: most clips from that time are WMV or DV-AVI, which no browser can decode, so they need converting to MP4 first, keeping their names. Photos and music normally work as they are.

Sources

Updated 25 October 2026.