Good video converters?

I am trying to convert a bunch of videos to have a very specific screen size and a frame rate of less than 24 FPS.

The problem is that every conversion program I have found either does one thing or it does the other; I have not found a single program that both changes the image size and the frame rate at the same time.

Any recomendations for a decent one?

Virtual Dub does the job nicely for me.

Yup. Works for me too.

Thanks... looks like an excellent program.

But is there anything that writes MPEG-1 or 2?

TMPGEnc, though not free. Oh wait, maybe it only does codecs + MPEG4...

I looked at that one, and it does its job, but I have problems resizing the video...


(Seem to be unable to, in fact. I'll play with these disabled things for a bit longer... it may be disabled for the demo)

Really? Only problems I've encountered with resizing are related to interlaced sources (ie DVD), but nothing substantial... Then again I'm not using the 2.x version of TMPGEnc, I'm using v3 so there could be a difference.

I've been using TMPGEnc Express for around a year to convert AVI's to MPG1/2. No problems so long as you've got the right codec's installed for your AVI's. It supports frame resizing, frame rate change and heaps of other cool filtering options. At the end it spit's out (optionally) NTSC/PAL DVD compliant MPG1/2 files in 4:3 or 16:9 format. It's my favourite tool for getting AVI's ready for DVD authoring. The only things I can really pick it for are:

- No 5.1 channel audio. You need to downsample this to 2 channel before processing with TMPGEnc Express.

- No .mkv or .ogm support.

Hope this helps.

Ah, TMPGEnc Express is much better.

I use WinAVI for converting for dvd authoring. Not many programs faster than it... It'll resize, but I never mess with that functionality of it.

@Kanati: Nice one. I'll have to check it out. I like the 5.1 support. Been missing that for a while.

Oh, goody. Thanks K.

Hate to high-jack, but anyone know of a program that converts from WMV to anything not WMV?

Google "wmv to avi", it came up with a lot of decent results for me.

Adobe Aftereffects will do all things you asking for...even more..

My non-computer-literate friend has just successfully used Nero 7 to transcode an AVI into MPEG2 (and thence to DVD). Must be a fairly simple process, but I wouldn't like to guess exactly how much control you have over the process.

WinAvi, once again, will convert just about anything. Even does asf files and flash swf. :)

I realise this thread is a couple of days old, but if you need MPEG2 support, you can use this: http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/stable/

Sorry about a dumb question, but what is the most used movieclip compressor/codec in games ?

@Alienforce: Hard to say, it depends on many factors.

Mostly, what player routines do you use? The *safest* way of doing it is to have your own codec/player routine as part of your distribution. You can rarely count on a user system to have the right general codecs installed to be compatible with your game, so it's a bad thing to depend on that. If you do, you need to make sure that you use one of the very generic codecs (e.g. the old Indeo AVI encoding, or MPEG-1) that will be present on a basic fresh windows installation... But even then you have no guarantee that a user didn't mess up the codec, or it got uninstalled/deregistered, or taken out of the next windows version.
To play it safe, you need to have your own self-contained player routines that do not depend on any pre-installed system libraries... The availability of which would dictate what file format to use.

If you have multiple player routines around, you need to make some other choices: Is image quality the most important aspect, or a small filesize? Do you target high-end machines, or low-end ones? A video player can add a lot of CPU overhead, so some formats may not be suitable for your game since it may not run smoothly enough on a low-end machine, etc.
For others being able to protect & lock up video into a proprietary format may outweigh the other considerations...

all in all, only you can determine what the best combintation of all these considerations is for your particular game

Most commercial games today use Bink - a successor to Smacker. But it's codec is a dll, so you don't have to worry about the installation on a user machine.
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