Topic: Anyone know of a good video converter? (Page 1 of 1)

I'm looking for a video converter that will convert most anything to a avi. The reason for this is the school that I work at has a number of video cameras that the students use (Many are cameras from home.) but we only have Windows Movie Maker to edit the videos with, and Movie Maker does not work with that many file types.
Now we cannot afford to get a video converter for each computer in the school.

So any suggestions for freebies?
I've been trying Google for a while now but the free packages I can find are either use limited or not user friendly enough for a high school.

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SUPER ©: http://download.videohelp.com/download/SUPERsetup200830.exe

Just a win32 frontend to ffmpeg/MPlayer functionality.

You could also install Cygwin, drop ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/cygwinports into the server list, and check off ffmpeg to be installed. A simple command to convert most any format to AVI would then be ffmpeg -i whatever.xxx -sameq whatever.avi. The -sameq preserves video quality, and is sometimes overkill.

(Edited by reisio on 06-04-2008 01:24)

Wow - that's actually some really useful information for me too, Reiso. Thanks a bunch!

I think VLC has a pretty good video conversion tool too. At least, the audio conversion works splendidly (Though since it's transcoding and not just applying a new container to the same data, it's lossy...).

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Thanks for the links guys.
I've been dealing with printers and DVD drives the last couple days so I'll have a chance to really look into things tomorrow.

__________________________
Eagles get sucked into jet engines and weasels are oft maligned, but beavers just make nice hats.
WCG|FA@H