Top 5 Media Converters

Back in the day we had VHS tapes, our beloved form of analog video, with the tracking and patient rewinding. Now of course things have changed, and once those tiny little 1s and 0s came into mainstream, our lives got a little harder. Harder, because Digital video can be easily distributed and formated, and this is not necessarily a boon, what with big giant companies belting out new formats, and then the score of standards put out by the Moving Picture Experts Group like MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4 now.

But still there are always ways of converting between these varied forms of digital audio and video, and that is precisely what we will discuss today. 5 software that do the important task of converting media from one format to the next, basically anything that we need. Thus for e.g., you have a DVD video backup, and you need to see it on your iPod or other PMP, then these softwares are what you can use. Some are free, some cost nominal amounts, but one thing is for sure - they are all good. I have also added an alternative for some, in the event that they cannot be downloaded. There are some that have MAC and Linux versions too…

Best Paid App

Any Video Converter
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What’s good
This is straightforward and very noob friendly. It is important too for those who simply do not want to get down to selecting too many codecs and understanding frame rates and smaller resolution. The GUI is simple and finishes the conversion in 3 steps. First we have to add the video, wherever it is on our HDD, and this is the good part as the input video can be a variety of formats. The number of formats this one can do is very impressive. In fact the free versions can convert avi, asf, mov, rm, rmvb, flv, mkv, mpg, 3gp, m4v, and vob to avi, wmv, mp4, 3gp, mpg (PAL or NTSC), MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, wmv and flv. Which means you can even convert Youtube videos and watch on your handheld. You can even batch encode, queue up file etc.

What’s not good
We could not find any real glitch except the fact that if you try converting to a file that is not supported, it will not give an error; rather it goes ahead and only converts audio. Thus we have to wait and then realize that our video has turned to a black screen with only dialogs.

Alternative
The alternative to this software would be its own free version, as its quite a nifty and handy little piece of work.

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Best Free App

Handbrake
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What’s good
This too is a very good software especially now that it can read many more sources than DVD. It can read almost any multimedia file with libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode. Also the original good qualities of DVD images and vob files is still very well supported. This is a free software that has MAC and Linux GUI versions, plus the miscellaneous features offered are nice. Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture), an integrated bitrate calculator for the input video and also stuff like Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling.