Freemake Free Video Converter review

Shopper’s video conversion program of choice used to be Super. It has one of the ugliest websites imaginable, it’s a nightmare to find the download link and the user interface is a complete mess of radio buttons and drop-down boxes. Despite this, we were happy to put up with Super’s idiosyncrasies for its unrivalled input and output support.

However, we have a new favourite. Free Video Converter is free (and easy) to download, and its user interface simple and attractive. It supports a large number of input video formats – we had no problems importing WMV, AVI, MP4 or MPEG-2 files. DVDs are trickier as it can’t cope with encypted discs – we used the excellent free HD Decrypter from www.dvdfab.com (download DVD Copy and select ‘HD Decrypter’ on installation) to rip the DVD to our hard disk, then opened it in Free Video Converter.

You can edit any input videos to the desired length then convert them to a huge number of preset formats; AVI, MKV, a selection of Apple products, Android phones in various resolutions, phone formats such as MP4 and 3GP, WMV and SWF. You can also edit the settings for each video format, so it’s possible to tweak video resolution, frame rate and bandwidth to suit your player. You can also queue up a selection of files to encode, but you can’t select a different output video type for each. There’s also the option to join the source files together into one big video for export.

You can create a DVD with the results, or even burn to blu-ray. It’s a shame you can’t convert a DVD directly to a phone-compatible format – we’d still use Handbrake for that – but as a general video conversion program Free Video Converter comes highly recommended.