WinAvi Video Converter Review

I've been working with video for about four years now. During that time, I've worked with a multitude of tools. Everything from avisynth and Virtualdub (freeware) to Sonic Scenarist (starting at $5000). Despite the vast differences in price, there is one universally shared characteristic: A steep learning curve.

This is where WinAvi hopes to capitalize. It takes what used to be a fairly complicated task, typically requiring several tools, and combines them all into one easy to use application.

The installation was very straightforward and even finds potential problems upon its first run. In my case, it found an old installation of Quicktime Alternative that may have caused a problem.

Once everything is installed, your presented with the option of converting your videos to WMV, AVI, DVD/VCD/SVCD/MPEG, or RM formats.

I chose to test out the programs capabilities with a 15 minute MPEG2 clip displaying at 544 x 480 resolution at a 1.5 Mbit bitrate. I know, I know, I was hoping to keep the technical jargon to a minimum, but sometimes exceptions must be made.

Converting the actual file was fairly easy. The user is presented with only a few relevant choices at a time, instead of being bombarded with a several options all at once. WinAVI gives the user adequate control over some of the more technical particulars such as Aspect Ratio, height and width adjustments, and support for PAL (used Primarily in Europe) and NTSC (used Primarily in North America) formats.

Impressive still is the support for batch processing and file splitting. Both of which are very important if you have to convert several files without checking up on the conversion progress every 15 minutes. File splitting support is of particular importance for those of you still using FAT32 formatted hard drives, because of the file systems 2 gigabyte file size limit it may be necessary when working with very large video files.

During my tests, the overall conversion time for a 15 minute MPEG2 clip was as follows:

WMV: 35 minutes
AVI: 6 minutes
MPEG:8 minutes
RM: Untested

I was fairly surprised by the speed of converting to AVI and MPEG formats, more than likely due to the fact that it recompresses the video instead of reencoding it. I did notice that converting to WMV did leave a bit to be desired in the speed category though.

However, the most important feature of any conversion tool, is the quality of its output. WinAVI does a fairly decent job at converting the video and produces a decent result in the quality department when converting to WMV. However, I was not thrilled with the results of converting to MPEG and AVI. Both results were a bit blurry for my tastes.

Still another disappointment was the lack of any tool to calculate the file size of the final product. This severely limits the user if he or she must work within file size constraints, for say e-mailing or uploading a video to a website. For $25 dollars, something like this should come included.