Recommendations for Video Converters

[xosuitehearts]

Hi everyone,

I was curious on what some of your recommendations are for the latest video converters. I have used XMedia & Handbrake and older converters like AutoGK & GK - and would like to know of some other newer converters that would convert to .divx or .xvid or .avi because Handbrake doesnt seem to have that option.

Please help me out, I will be very thankful.

[ggtop]

Handbrake had an option to output to xvid in earlier releases...0.9.3 I think.
Which sources do you want to convert to these formats?

ggtop

[setarip_old]

@xosuitehearts

Hi!

In an earlier post, you said

I use GK because it has everything that I need all in one area.

Has something changed that REQUIRES you to use something other than AutoGK?

[yetanotherid]

I still use AutoGK for converting to XviD. It could probably do with a bit of updating (ability to save job lists, using external audio, using a previous compression text and analysis of a video instead of starting again from scratch every time.....) but because of the way it resizes video... it doesn't fudge the aspect ratio to fit the closest mod16 dimensions as other programs do.... instead it resizes to the appropriate height and then crops a few more pixels off each side if necessary to maintain the original aspect ratio..... I still use it in preference to everything else.

And I'm not sure why yet.... maybe it's the non aspect ratio fudging resizing method.... but I've done comparison XviD encodes to the same resolution using other programs such as MeGUI and HDConvertToX (I use them both regularly for x264 encoding) and every time AutoGK's output will look slightly better. It not huge... far from it... but if you compare AutoGK's output to that produced by other GUIs the fine details are often just a little sharper. I've tried using the same resizing methods with other programs and duplicating the scripts AutoGK produces for using with other programs too, but being far from an expert on AVISynth scripts I'm still at the trial and error stage.

And as a bonus, even though AutoGK was designed for converting DVDs, it will convert AVIs to AVI, and as it does so via directshow I've discovered it'll happily convert the video in MKVs and MP4s as long as you change the file extension to AVI (probably other file types too). Once I've converted, I just change the extension back to what it was originally. You can't convert the audio that way because AutoGK can't demux it, but I use foobar2000 for that. It's an audio player which will happily open and play the audio in MP4 and MKV video files, and it'll also convert anything it can play (and there's a plugin for converting 5.1ch to stereo). So while AutoGK is converting the video (I pretty much always just run single pass encodes at a given quality as I'm quality obsessed rather than file size obsessed) I convert the audio with foobar2000, and then when AutoGK is finished I used VirtualDub to mux the two together into a new AVI. You can't get much easier than that even with a shiny new GUI hot off the production line. In fact many of them seem to overly complicate things at times.

So for me it's still AutoGK for all things XviD and usually MeGUI for x264, although it'll encode to XviD in AVIs just as happily.

The two programs I'd look at other than AutoGK for XviD are MeGUI or HDConvertToX, and they'll both convert to x264 as well.
MeGUI is very versatile although it took me a while to get the feel for it, but now I really like it. It doesn't overly complicate things as a GUI while still being quite versatile in terms of adding AVISynth scripts etc.
HDConvertToX is for me very straight forward to use, but still does the job well. It'll run a compression test to see what sort of quality you can expect from a 2 pass encode (why don't many other GUIs do that any more?) and when resizing and cropping it'll calculate the aspect ratio fudge as you go so you can adjust the cropping for minimal fudge (why don't other GUI's do the same?). I prefer the AutoGK method but that's a close second. Oh.... and neither HdConvertToX or AutoGK are silly enough to have ITU resizing enabled by default. ;-)