WinAvi Video Converter Review
Good Flexible option for video conversion
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Handles just about any sort of video file you want to convert. Clean easy to use interface.
It takes a lot of processing power. It's best to run it overnight or at other times when you aren't doing other work at the computer. It won't handle wmv files that have digital rights management enabled (external licences) and it doesn't recognize mkv media files.
Most people want video converersion software so they can take files they have downloaded and convert them into formats that they can burn and watch on stand alone DVD players, either standard players or one of the DIVX compatable players. Since the downloaded files can come in all sorts of formats you need a powerful flexible tool to convert video files into formats that the stand alone players can play.
With so much freeware that does this.. why buy one? The answer is power and flexibilty. Most of the freeware will only convert one type of file so you end up needing one tool for mpegs and another tool for avi's etc. Another problem with the freeware is because of licencing issues you usually can't convert real video files or windows media files.
You can even use winavi to recode non compliant files into compliant ones just by choosing the same input and output format. I get files that have qpel or custom mpeg encoding that won't play on my stand alone divx player. With winavi converter I can easily recode them to divx or xvid avi files that will play just fine. This feature isn't really obvious when you look at the interface. It appears that you have to convert from one format to another but you can choose the same input and output format and it will reencode just fine.
I also find that it will usually read and repair files that my media players report as damaged.
Winavi converter is a easy to use flexible and powerful tool. Real video heads may want more ability to tweak the output but for the average person that just wants to get files into some compatable format without having to use a bunch of different tools it's an excellent choice.