Download Squad

Converting video files from one format to another is one of the more frustrating tasks users find as they delve into the capabilities of their system. I know of more than a handful of Windows users that became very frustrated upon discovering that working with video files is a journey into a dark forest of codecs, acronyms and incompatible file formats.

MediaCoder is a free open-source utility that was developed to help users move their video around easily, for example to iPods or PSPs. While Microsoft has the very useful Windows Media Encoder, it of course can only convert audio and video into Windows Media formats. While they are arguably very good file formats, this does not provide for the flexibility most users are looking for. MediaCoder provides the ability to move video files from almost any format to almost any other format, and do so more elegantly than most of the commercial video conversion products I've tried.

As can be expected, MediaCoder is not extremely fast when doing complicated transcodings. This isn't a knock against the program though; the intense compression algorithms that modern video file formats use make heavy use of the CPU for encoding and decoding, and MediaCoder simply can't escape that fact. I should also note that it is very well-suited to working with audio files.

If you prefer a funkier user interface, MediaCoder offers an alternative user interface, seen here.