7 free video converting, ripping, and encoding utilities

Posted on November 14, 2007 at 4:05 pm

With the explosion of YouTube, podcasts from all over the Internet, and tons of handheld media players, it’s pretty imperative to have a good set of free video conversion/ripping/encoding utilities on hand so that you can play your video on not only your computer, but also your iPod, PSP, or DVD player! There are tons of commercial applications to convert video from AVI to DVD, etc, etc, but there are also plenty of freeware applications that handle the job just as well.

Using these utilities, you can convert a YouTube video to DVD format, transfer a DVD to your iPod, or convert a podcast to PSP format!

	VLC media player is not really a converter or encoder as you can tell by the name. It’s a portable player for audio and video formats, including DVD VCDs, and streaming protocols. It can also rip DVDs and play ISO and FLV (downloaded YouTube) video files.

	Avi2DVD is a great freeware utility that converts Avi/OGM/MKV/WMV/DVD files to DVD/SVCD/VCD format. It also supports subtitles and can create DVD menus with chapters, audio, and buttons.

	Handbrake is an open-source and multi-platform DVD to MPEG-4 video converter that works on Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s a great tool for backing up or ripping your DVDs.

	MediaCoder is another open source app that combines many other open sources video and audio converters into one package. Converts audio and video for digital audio players, MP4 players, mobile phones, PDAs, PSP, VCD/DVD players.

	Videora Converter is actually a set of programs to convert from one format to a specific format, such as iPod Converter, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, Apple TV, PSP, XBox 360, Tivo Converter, and PMP.

	HeyWatch is a cool web service where you can upload videos and convert them to H264, MP4, FLV, WMV, DivX, HD Videos, 3GP, iPod, Archos, and PSP. You can also transfer videos from videos sites to your hard drive in a different format.

	DVD Shrink has been around for a long time and is one of my favorite programs. DVD Shrink is a program that allows you to backup DVD discs to your computer. You can also cut out stuff like extras, bonus material, trailers, etc to save space. And of course it compresses the DVDs quite well so they do not take up as much space.