Out of memory errors with the Windows Media Format SDK

Over the last few years I’ve worked with a number of engineers that have reported out of memory errors when encoding high definition (HD) video using the Windows Media Format SDK. This issue typically only occurs on 32 bit systems. As we know on a 32 bit Windows OS the maximum memory that your application can allocate is 2 GB. If we try to allocate more than this we get an out of memory error.