Expand If you're getting your movie and TV show library in order, it helps to have all of your video in one format that you know every device you own can play without issue. However, if your collection spans years of downloads, rips, and saved copies, your files can be all over the place. This week we're going to look at five of the best video conversion tools that can faithfully get your media library organized and ready to watch anytime, anywhere.
Earlier in the week we asked you which video converters are the best. You weighed in with more options than we could possibly highlight, but after tallying them all up, there were five that stood out above the others. Here's what you said, in no particular order:
MPEG Streamclip (Windows/OS X)
MPEG Streamclip is a powerful video player, editor, and conversion tool for Mac and Windows. It's great at transcoding, but it's also a great organizational tool for all of your video and media. If you opt to use it as a player, you can play all manner of video files through it, but from a video transcoding and conversion perspective, it's fast, flexible, and completely free. Those of you who nominated it pointed out that it may not be the newest video conversion app out there, and it may not be the prettiest, but it gets the job done and can convert just about anything to just about anything else quickly, easily, and without complaining—and that's what's important.
Format Factory (Windows)
Format Factory is a free, richly featured video conversion tool that can convert a laundry list of video formats to a wealth of popular, supported formats. Its interface leaves a bit to be desired, but it offers you a ton of conversion options and tweaks to make sure all of your videos are the same, or each video is just right. The utility even promises to repair broken audio or video if it can process it. You can use quick presets to convert videos for mobile devices, and even rip DVDs. Those of you who praised Format Factory noted that you've never had a video format that the tool couldn't convert to another format that you actually needed, and hey—it can also convert almost any video format to GIF, which is a pretty nice trick.
Handbrake (Windows/OS X/Linux)
Video conversion and transcoding is actually Handbrake's bread and butter. Even though it's useful for a ton of other things (not to mention it's your favorite DVD ripping tool), at its core it does a fantastic job of converting and transcoding video from one format to another, while giving you all the features, tweaks, and options you need to make sure it plays smoothly on whatever device or screen you plan to send it to. It's one of those tools that has single push-button options if that's what you want, or deeper tweaks if you prefer those. Even with its options, it's not the most detailed and option-rich app in the roundup, as many of you pointed out. Many of you did praise the fact that Handbrake is free, open-source, cross platform, and gets the job done quickly—and doesn't discriminate by codec, either.
Freemake Video Converter (Windows)
Freemake Video Converter is, as the name implies, completely free, and a great tool if you're looking for more options than you could possibly need in a package that's actually really attractive and fun to use. Freemake supports over 200 video formats and outputs in virtually every popular format you can think of, and can even convert online videos to mp3. There are simple presets for iOS and Android devices, as well as other tablets, handheld game consoles, and other devices. If you don't like the presets in the app, you can really customize your own. You can cut, join, and rearrange videos to create seamless final products, and more. Those of you who nominated it pointed out that first, all this power is completely free, doesn't hesitate to leverage the power of your PC's hardware to power through those conversions, and can handle anything you throw at it—seriously, anything.
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