How do I verify that the encoding session is working properly?
You can monitor the main window of Windows Media Encoder as you are encoding. The General tab of the Monitor panel displays information such as elapsed time, CPU load, and remaining disk space. On the Video panel, you can view the pre-encoded content, the encoded output, or both, to check on the content quality. If you are pushing a stream to a Windows Media server, the Server tab of the Monitor panel displays status information about the server (unicast streams only). Note that you must have access permission to the Windows Media Services service through DCOM to receive the status information.