List Some Good Video Converting Software

[Vince2501]

Is it a little too early to ask this? Say I want to take my 700 MB DVX file of The Story Of Ricky, and convert it to around 300 MB and have it an optimal setting for the Pandora. What software would you guys recommend?

 

[sam fisher]

Virtual dub?

 

[CronoTriggerfan]

If you like a lotta settings and control of pretty much everything, I recommend MediaCoder. By the way, I completely expect a device plugin for Pandora on MediaCoder! :lol:

 

[javaJake]

HandBrake (main site). Nice GUI, ffmpeg backend, cross-OS (minus Linux, sorry folks, but you can probably replicate it easily with ffmpeg anyway). Can't go wrong with that.

 

[Prometheus]

(minus Linux, sorry folks, but you can probably replicate it easily with ffmpeg anyway)

Actually, there is a Linux version, with a couple of work-in-progress GUIs available (although they're not in the version on the main download page yet, though).

 

[AireTamStorm]

Pandora is fast enough to play all media b720p and below anyway. I personally see no need to re-encode and degrade the quality of the video.

If I had to use something, it'd be ffmpeg.

 

[CronoTriggerfan]

Pandora is fast enough to play all media b720p and below anyway. I personally see no need to re-encode and degrade the quality of the video.

Honestly, though, who wants a gigantic movie file on a portable device, anyways? At such a low resolution, compressional artifacts are going to be tough to spot. As someone who is buying two 16 gig SDHC cards for Pandora, I'm still going to be compressing files to a certain extent.

Now if Pandora supported higher resolutions for TV-out, that'd be a different story...

 

[PandoraLox]

Not familiar with Linux apps that's capable of the job, but Super Converter always worked for me... everything plus the kitchen sink

 

[AireTamStorm]

Honestly, though, who wants a gigantic movie file on a portable device, anyways? At such a low resolution, compressional artifacts are going to be tough to spot. As someone who is buying two 16 gig SDHC cards for Pandora, I'm still going to be compressing files to a certain extent.

I'm going to be getting dual 16GB SDHC cards as well. Most of my videos average 200-400MB a piece. The important thing is, I don't HAVE to convert files to leave the house with them, I can simply pop them on the device and there I go.I hate waiting 20 minutes even on a quad core CPU to convert a couple videos down to a device's resolution. Pandora will rid me of the hassle, so I'm happy.

 

[CronoTriggerfan]

Honestly, though, who wants a gigantic movie file on a portable device, anyways? At such a low resolution, compressional artifacts are going to be tough to spot. As someone who is buying two 16 gig SDHC cards for Pandora, I'm still going to be compressing files to a certain extent.

I'm going to be getting dual 16GB SDHC cards as well. Most of my videos average 200-400MB a piece. The important thing is, I don't HAVE to convert files to leave the house with them, I can simply pop them on the device and there I go.I hate waiting 20 minutes even on a quad core CPU to convert a couple videos down to a device's resolution. Pandora will rid me of the hassle, so I'm happy.

Wow, your videos are tiny! Most of mine are high-quality rips that hover around 700 megs to 1.5 gigs, in some cases.

 

[PandoraLox]

I can imagine that -maybe- the only real legitimate reason to optimize the videos down to the Pandora's resolution would be perhaps to try & save more on battery life. I can imagine that running a movie that runs on 600 x 400 resolution would be alot less taxing then the same thing running 1024 x 800 or whatever. Storage is another but with 16GB SDHC cards dropping in price with 32GB looming by... not sure if it'd be that big a deal (at least it isn't for me personally)

Might mean a difference when watching a season of 'The Wire' or several long winded movies on a painfully long trip. In which case - I think it'd be interesting to see a detailed rundown of battery life when running different video resolutions.

 

[RMJ250]

Only discovered recently VLC can convert videos too! Go to File/Open File then tick the Stream/Save option under advanced then go to the settings

 

[Esn]

Virtual dub?

Seconded. It has tons of features and is pretty easy to use after you read a tutorial and figure out the basics.

EDIT: Although I haven't tried anything else. Are the other programs mentioned above better in some respect?

 

[Snu]

ill second mediacoder. it handles everything i throw at it (and i work in video editing), has an insane amount of features, presets, and batch conversions.
virtualdub is really not that great if you just want to be able to convert anything to anything else, but it does have some more advanced features.

 

[sindbad]

Also try Avidemux.

 

[MilanC]

Plain ol' ffmpeg.
Long live bash script programming.
./reencode video.avi

 

[EmuGuy]

If you're on the Mac, VisualHub is the way to go...it's more or less a frontend for ffmpeg, but I've never liked ffmpegX on the Mac, the ease of use is not there. VisualHub is easily worth the money, for the batch processing and presets alone.

That said, I'm hoping to do less converting for Pandora. I pretty much stopped putting video on the GP2X several months ago, not worth it. Pandora will make it right!

 

[Karel Jansens]

Personally, I like PocketDivXEncoder for transcoding. It's fast, has lots of presets and it makes it very easy to preset a file length.

Oh yeah, it's free too. Sorta, donations are appreciated...

 

[fahrstuhl]

Winff is a very cool ffmpeg frontend with programmable presets. I like it ;D

 

[cbox]

I like handbrake and Super, both are pretty good.

Handbrake for a dvd source, Super for other various video formats.