Video formats are still messing up with us these days. The clips recorded from your phone may play well on your computer but when you send them away to others they may stop playing due to incompatibility codec issues.
Getting support calls asking for converting video format from one to the other seems to be a daily task sometimes. Here is what I use to accomplish these tasks, quickly, easily, and doesn’t cost a dime.
My secret weapon turns out to be one of my favorite media players of all time, VLC media player.
Open VLC media player, if you already have it installed, go to Media and select the Convert / Save… option.
In the Open Media dialog box that pops open, drag the video files that you want to convert into the File Section box, and click Convert / Save button at the bottom of the box.
Under Settings in the Convert dialog box, select the video or audio format from the Profile dropdown menu. Then specify the folder and file name you want to use before clicking Start to start the conversion process.
Each pre-defined Profile can be customized. Simply click the little wrench icon next to the dropdown box to open the Profile edition box and adjust the settings there if the pre-defined one isn’t good enough for your video.
And that’s about it, easy and effective.
Two more things I’d like to add that make my work a lot easier. One, you can convert multiple media files in batches. And two, you can extract the audio track out of a video file.
Imagine someone dumping over 50 video files to you and asking you to extract all the audio tracks and send them over back. With VLC, it can be done in one shot.