Great tool for converting all sorts of different video files?

August 29, 2007 12:19 PM

Great swiss-army-knife-type Windows app (preferably free) for resizing/downsampling/converting movie files from various formats?

We've got a bunch of video files (and will get a bunch more over time) in just about every format imaginable, in all sorts of different resolutions, at all sorts of different qualities/file sizes. I'm looking for a tool that will let me take them and convert them all (one-at-a-time is fine) to a standardized set of attributes yet to be determined (probably something like .mov, 320x200, filesize no greater than 10 mb - these are short, small films).

Is there such a thing, for Windows, freeware?

posted by jbickers to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Mediacoder does just this
posted by piro at 12:33 PM on August 29, 2007

mplayer/mencoder?
posted by cmiller at 12:35 PM on August 29, 2007

Don't know if this will exactly fit your needs, but I've used Pocket Divx Encoder for a while. It supports batch processes, fixed dimensions, and size.

Might be worth a look... and it's donationWare.
posted by Mark5four0 at 12:35 PM on August 29, 2007

Super? Not a fan of the GUI, but supports a lot of formats.
posted by sharkfu at 12:57 PM on August 29, 2007

"Windows Movie Maker" is included with XP, and it's actually quite good. (But it outputs as Windows Media Format, not as Quicktime MOV.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:59 PM on August 29, 2007

MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding...it says here.
posted by dash_slot- at 1:14 PM on August 29, 2007

I've used tons of software that claims to convert between different codecs/resolutions, etc, like MediaCoder claims to, but they've all sucked. (Audio out of sync, video not playable, etc..)

If it doesn't work for you, try River Past Video Cleaner. It's the only software I could find that actually did what I wanted to. (1080p WMV -> 720p H.264)
posted by mphuie at 1:54 PM on August 29, 2007

Super and DVDshrink were very helpful recently. Both free.
posted by theora55 at 2:53 PM on August 29, 2007

I'll nth Super. It's free and just, well, super.
posted by 543DoublePlay at 3:59 PM on August 29, 2007

gonna go with mplayer/mencoder. It's my video swiss army knife.
posted by nikko at 7:09 PM on August 29, 2007