Evening. I am after a free video convertor that will allow me to convert downloaded videos for example from .wmv to .avi etc etc...i have a couple that i need to convert to play on my TV via a external hdd. I have used freemake in the past but it can be a bit slow so wondered if there was any alternative reliable software out there that takes advantage of the rig i have to convert videos. I dont mind if its on a 30 day trail and i have to buy a license later as long as it does the job and quickly than freemake does currently.
I've never tried freemake so I don't know. When I was looking for a converter, the only thing I really saw people recommending was Handbrake, assuming of course you want h264. I think modd1uk was getting around 160fps on a 720p vid transcode with the 2500k @~4.4 Also, I've never personally noticed a difference between very fast conversions on handbrake and slower ones, so we stick to that
The best thing you can do is not to get things in other than h264 in the first place. Next, I use avidemux to container swap from for example, mkv to mp4 so other devices can actually play them. Doing this doesn't require any transcoding at all and the whole operation takes seconds. If you do need to, you can transcode the audio only from ac3/dts to aac stereo for tablet use for example. Doing the audio only still only takes a few minutes compared to a full audio and video transcode. Otherwise if that really isn't an option I prefer freemake to handbrake by far. freemake is far less fussy about the input formats and I don't have to jack around with settings so much. I also have had a lot of unusable file output from handbrake and none from freemake. I find both take about the same time, but at least with freemake I only have to do it once. If you need something that does transcoding very fast and have nvidia card you can try out mediacoder cuda. It does do the job very quickly but the quality is not as good as a trade off.
Hmm odd, don't think I've ever had a dodge file with Handbrake, nor it refuse to accept an input. Moot point though since freemake takes the same time, OP you may as well stick with freemake. Don't go for anything done by GPU or quicksync, quality isn't great from what I've seen. Not unless it's improved a lot. Also, good advice from Ivan in his 1st para, totally agreed.
To be fair, with handbrake it has been with the x64 version with bad output. I don't think I had problems with that before when I last used the 32bit version on Windows. As far as format input, I have had some issues with files that had odd codecs, mostly ending up with no sound on handbrake. No problem on freemake though. The only real reason I still use both is because freemake dosen't seem to have the option for soft subtitles. If I need to do a total transcode with something that requires subtitles I like to do it in one step instead of fooling around with mp4box to add the subtitle afterwards.