Last week, someone asked, “What I’m really looking for is Format Factory for Mac but I don’t think it exists. Can someone recommend a good free media converter for Mac?“
Since Visual Hub is no longer available, I offered up MPEG StreamClip:
MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL
You can use MPEG Streamclip to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, …
Of course, I was thinking that another solution exists on UbuntuLinux-read this post on converting videos on Ubuntulinux using this solution–known as FFMPEG. This free, open source converter works well but is command line only.
That means that Windows users may have a bit of trouble. At least, they did until this new solution came out: WinFF.
WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions….
Nice to be aware of the various solutions available for converting video, especially since they are changing constantly! So, a quick review of video conversion tools:
- Mac: MPEG Streamclip, ffmpegX ($15 shareware)
- Windows: MPEG StreamClip, Format Factory or WinFF
- UbuntuLinux/Debian: WinFF with specific instructions for installation here
Update 11/25/2009: Thanks to Wes Fryer’s contribution of ffmpegX GUI interface for Mac. Unfortunately, it is shareware…and it didn’t work for me. So, give it a shot if MPEG Streamclip doesn’t work for you.
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FFmpegx is a free GUI version of ffmpeg for Mac:http://homepage.mac.com/major4/
FFmpegx is a free GUI version of ffmpeg for Mac:http://homepage.mac.com/major4/
Wes, thanks for sharing. That program is shareware and when I tried it (just now), it did not work converting an FLV to MP4.The install process also seems a bit esoteric for most users, although not impossible. Nevertheless, thanks for sharing!
Wes, thanks for sharing. That program is shareware and when I tried it (just now), it did not work converting an FLV to MP4.The install process also seems a bit esoteric for most users, although not impossible. Nevertheless, thanks for sharing!
Anyone knows a good program to easily encode/transcode to Ogg Theora?
Anyone knows a good program to easily encode/transcode to Ogg Theora?
Pat, yes there are! Try reading this blog entry I wrote just for you – http://www.mguhlin.org/2009/11/audiotools-encoding-to-ogg-format.htmlTake care,Miguel
Pat, yes there are! Try reading this blog entry I wrote just for you – http://www.mguhlin.org/2009/11/audiotools-encoding-to-ogg-format.htmlTake care,Miguel