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Yesterday the Participatory Culture Foundation, the same one that develops the video player Miro, launched the Watch Video Converter, a simple and free application to convert almost any video to theory. Miro Converter can also convert to .mp4 and has support for specific devices such as Android cell phones, iPhone, iPod and portable Play Stations (PSP). Like the rest of the programs created by this foundation, Miro Video Converter is free and open source. |
The goal of Miro Video Converter is to provide a fast, easy and intuitive way to convert videos. Most of the video converters have a lot of complicated settings that need to be understood in order to encode and convert our video. Miro Video Converter is much simpler. Just select the file, then the format or device and click "convert". The program takes care of complicated settings and gets the job done cleanly and quickly.
At last there is an application (I mean a GUI) that allows converting to free and high quality formats (like Ogg Theora) from our desktop and without much effort.
Some technical data that may interest you: Miro Video Converter (MVC) is based on ffmpeg. If you are interested in seeing what configurations use MVC to convert the videos, check them out. For conversion to Theora, MVC uses ffmpeg2theora, which includes the Thusnelda encoder for the best possible quality. Finally, the source code has been released under the GPL license and you can download it from here. It was developed in conjunction with 8 Planes, a group of world-class developers.
The bad news, which caught my attention, is that there is no Linux version of this program. There are only versions for Mac and Windows. Anyway, I found it interesting to mention its launch, especially because of the impact it could have when uploading videos to Wikipedia.
It is not the only converter there are many in open source linux. I do not know what this application looks like if it only starts on proprietary OS and does not allow use in linux….
It's a very good point. I think they will launch the Linux version shortly.
Anyway, we already have the ffmpeg libraries with Webm support which would facilitate the creation of new supported GUIs as well.
Thanks x comment! Cheers! Paul.
makes a transcoder edge post, notice how interesting it is
Come on, I'll keep it in mind.
I've been using it for a while and it's really very good.
A big hug and thank you for commenting!
Cheers! Paul.