Over the years, we’ve amassed quite a number of freeware video converters; and over the years, there is one that we kept installed on the computer and use whenever there’s a need to convert video. Any Video Converter is that program.
We love this program. It’s simple to use and supports a great number of video formats. The supported input formats include, AVI, WMV, MOV, MP4, M4V, RM, RMVB, FLV, MKV, MPG, VOB, DIVX, AMV. This is just a short list. The program supports many other formats, and ones that we, and most probably, many have never even heard of.
In terms of the output formats, this is a list of what the program supports: MP4, FLV, SWF, MPG, AVI, WMV, ASF, MKV, M2TS, and MPG. The list isn’t as extensive, but it does support many common formats supported in popular media players and portable devices[*]. As well, if you’re trying to convert your source file so that it is supported by your video editing program, the ones Any Video Converter offer is more than sufficient—since at least one in the list is accepted by most video editing software/freeware.
Another great feature about this video converter is it has the ability to take your video file and output sound too. So, let’s say you have a Flash Video file (FLV) that has some audio on it, and you’d like to output it as a WAV. To do this, you simply add the video file to be converted, select output to WAV, and then convert away. A short time later, voilà, you now have an audio file that can be listened to on your computer or audio player, or you can use it as a soundtrack for a project you’re producing. Very handy feature.
The last feature we want to mention about is the program’s ability to save captures/snapshots of the video footage as still images. Whilst the video is playing, you click the camera icon on the program’s control bar and the image is saved as a PNG to the designated path you set in the Options menu item. This feature isn’t very accurate if you wish to capture an exact frame like you do in an actual video editing program, but it is handy if you wish to capture a random shot to use as a thumbnail for your blog or website. Handy!
here are quite a number of features in this simple video converter. It not only converts video to other video formats, but it can also act as an audio extractor by inputting a video file and outputting it as an audio file. To put the icing on the cake, there’s a feature to obtain image stills from the footage. Awesome!
* Any Video Converter doesn’t seem to output video files too nicely if you’re hoping to convert your source file to MP4 for the Sony Video Walkman. For a program that does work, our blog post entitled “Finally! A video converter for the Sony Video Walkman!” suggests one.
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