Quick Media Converter is a Windows utility that will let you convert practically any audio or video file from one format to another. MPEG to H.264? No problem. WAV to OGG? Sure, why not.

Now let's get something out of the way here. Quick Media Converter is basically just a fancy front end for the open source, command line FFmpeg media encoder. But it's a really useful front end. The utility offers you two interfaces: an easy mode and an expert mode. In easy mode, you can choose from a number of predefiined formats. So just select the media files you want to convert, and click the Audio, Quicktime, WMV, DiVX, Xbox, PS3, or Wii button to create a file optimized for your system of choice.

In Expert mode, you have much more control over the code choices and settings. For example, in easy mode, there's no way to convert a FLAC file to OGG. But you can do that in expert mode.

The program also includes a bundled copy of CamStudio for making screencapturs which you can then convert to other formats using Quick Media Converter. In a nutshell, Quick Media Converter doesn't do anything that MediaCoder doesn't. But if you're looking for an even easier to use alternative, this program might be worth a look.

[via TechnoBuzz]

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.