Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Best video converter Review

Hey guys and gals, I’m back with another installment in my series on video conversion programs to be used to transfer your movies to the Tilt!

This week I’ve got an ‘official’ review, the folks over at Wondershare emailed me and asked me to check out their video conversion software, this isn’t a DVD ripper but just for converting your already existing videos to a format compatible with your Tilt or other phones of course.
Wondershare Video Convertor Platinum can convert to many formats and not just to PPC, so it’s actually a very useful program for any of your video conversion needs.

So, read on to check it out…
As usual we start off with the Specs and Features of the program, this is just the basics grabbed from their site, if you wish to read everything they’ve got about Wondershare Video Converter Platinum, stop on over
HERE to read all about it.
version: 4.0.3.0
Price: $35.00

Features:
Directly convert video for playback on all popular portable video/audio players ( Zune, iPod,Apple TV,iPhone, PSP, etc).

Convert video to most popular video formats with powerful video editing functions including video crop and video trimming and file merging.
Customize video/audio quality with various video and audio settings.


Wondershare Video Converter Platinum is the best video format converter that can convert your video files including FLV video to various formats to meet different format requirements and for playback on most popular players including iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, Zune, PSP, Pocket PC, Creative Zen, and Archos and so on. It is the best video converter that can convert WMV to AVI, VOB to AVI, and this YouTube Video Converter even convert video to Youtube or convert Youtube to video with excellent quality.


The best video converter supports video formats such as MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVI, WMV, RM, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, FLV, ASF and also HD video formats including TS, TP and TRP. It also supports audio formats including M4A, WMA, WAV, MP3, AAC and AC3. With the video joiner of this all-in-one video format converter, you can even merge multiple files into a single video file, and can trim or crop to edit your videos according to your need.



After installing the program just hit the shortcut on your desktop to load the program, we are greeted with a graphical interface, with simple instructions on how to use the program in the main window. The are only 4 steps to get your video converted easily, of course if you wish to change the settings etc you’ll add more steps to the process.

To pick your format click on ‘Profile’ near the bottom, a slide out menu appears and you’ve got several choices, of course since I’m converting for the Tilt I’m using the option for ‘Windows Mobile’, with that you’ve got three more choices, and for our use I picked ‘General Pocket PC Video’


Click ‘Add’ to add your video, just navigate to the file you wish to convert as you would in windows, very easily. I’m using Stargate again as I’ve used with all of the reviews in this series, I’ve already ripped it from DVD to AVI/Divx/Xvid format and it’s 1.5Gb in size. Since this software isn’t for DVD ripping you’ll basically only use videos that are already on your hard drive, so you’ll have to rip the DVD first with another program

if you wish to use one of your DVDs. Once you’ve got the file loaded, you’ll see the the ’settings’ option next the the profile selection box is now available, clicking it opens up further video options. For the General Pocket PC Video, you’ve only got the choice to convert to WMV format, and of course you can change other options as well like Frame Rate, Bit Rate, Resolution, and Audio options.


You can pick other formats, personally I like AVI or Xvid, but the estimated size was 1.5gb even for the 320×240 resolution, and that’s a bit big for me, so we’ll just stick with the WMV format that is the default for the PPC profile.


Once you’ve got all of your settings straight just click ‘Start’ and the conversion process will begin, a window pops up and gives you a preview, along with status of the conversion process. You can also select options to shutdown the computer when finished and open the output folder.
So here’s some stats for you:


Time to convert: 28:27
Output Size: 815MB
CPU Usage:
Average: 41%
Peak: 55%


The software estimated the output size at 957MB, and the actual output size is 815Mb, so it’s smaller which is nicer, still though 815mb is rather large, but with the cost of SDHC cards coming down most people can afford larger capacity cards, so you’ll be able to fit a few movies on your card at this size.


The time to convert is pretty good as well, coming in under 30 minutes to convert a movie that’s over 2 hours long, that’s about the average time for most conversion software packages out there today. Yes some are quicker, and of course so do take longer, but 28 minutes isn’t bad really.


So it doesn’t matter how fast or how big the converted video is if it isn’t any good right? Well I threw the converted Stargate over to my phone and fired it up, quality was very good, and the audio was synced fine with the video. What more could you ask for? So Wondershare Video Converter Platinum works as it it should, it gives us a viewable movie that looks good and plays fine.


The cost of the software is about right, coming in at $35.00 it’s worth the cost in my opinion as it can do more than just convert to your PPC, you can use the software for most all of your video conversion needs.


If I had to rate this software I would give it a 4.5 out of 5 score, and I think I could recommend it as well to anyone looking for a program that’s very easy to use, but does offer the ability to customize your output files and convert to many formats.

Pros:
-Easy to use
-Convert to many formats
-Customizable settings
-Relatively fast conversion


Cons:
-Large output size

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