Computer Hope
Software => Computer software => Topic started by: A10 Tactical on August 26, 2017, 11:19:25 AM
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Hello I was wondering if anyone had a recommendation for software that quickly (or quicker than xvid4psp) converts .mkv to .avi. I wasnt to convert many 45minute long videos that I have to the .avi format and move them to my ScreenPlay Pro HD which then connects to my tv. However the Screenplay is very picky with file formats and I have to use .avi on it.
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Lots of converters out there. Conversion Speed is usually controlled by the system that is doing the work, such as if your system has a lightweight CPU it will take longer than on a system with a powerful CPU, additionally the Hard Drive or SSD also comes into play with conversion speed.
For example I have a system that if I do the conversions by use of my hard drive, my quadcore CPU only runs at 60-70% for all cores. But if the video to be converted is on my SSD my CPU then hits 98-100% for all 4 cores, so its more efficient and faster to convert with the SSD drive which can read in the one video and write out the other video format thats being created very fast vs a slower hard drive. Other way to speed it up involves 2 internal hard drives so that one drive contains the video to be converted and the other drive is the destination to write the newly created video in the format of choice and this too causes the CPU to run more efficiently by not being bottlenecked by the drive that the video is read and converted on.
Only other slow conversion I have seen before are trial or demo versions of converters where they throttle them down as a means to get you to register and buy a licensed copy of the converter. These converters sometimes even watermark your video which is sad but its a means for them to get you to cough up the money to buy a licensed copy of the software to then be able to convert the videos faster and without watermark.
I use a tool called VirtualDub64 which is free and fast and you can create jobs and run batched conversions, but I am not sure if it will handle mkv format or not and I cant check from here since I am at work on break and have content restrictions :-\ . Other one would be FormatFactory which might also support mkv and is also free.
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handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/).
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nods handbrake is another free one as BC suggested .... but performance will still mainly depend on what you have for a CPU and Drive(s) performance.
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Missed that part of the Original question- yeah, different software isn't likely to actually have different performance. My recommendation for Handbrake would be largely just to avoid the myriad of crap that you can find if you search for "convert X to Y" for various file formats. For the most part it's going to support pretty much every format. (VirtualDub, unfortunately, doesn't seem to support MKV)
I'm sure many of us are familiar with those "solutions" which claim to offer speed and flexibility, and all seem to use the same set of images to portend that they are awful and you find out that unless you pay 29.99 or something they can barely be used at all.
Which leads to an interesting sidebar about those programs- they are all effectively the same thing- they are just a fancy skinned shell working around the free GPL ffmpeg tool. They are basically designed to scam users into paying them for the use of what is effectively a free tool.
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(VirtualDub, unfortunately, doesn't seem to support MKV)
There is a plug-in that you can add to Vdub, but I'd still go with Handbrake. Even better, ffmpeg, but not everybody likes the command line.
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Which leads to an interesting sidebar about those programs- they are all effectively the same thing- they are just a fancy skinned shell working around the free GPL ffmpeg tool. They are basically designed to scam users into paying them for the use of what is effectively a free tool.
Isn't Handbrake really just a very, very well done ffmpeg GUI front end? Not that I am criticising Handbrake - I use it often, and am glad to have it. It puts the junk applications to shame.
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Isn't Handbrake really just a very, very well done ffmpeg GUI front end? Not that I am criticising Handbrake - I use it often, and am glad to have it. It puts the junk applications to shame.
I think so, it uses ffmpeg for a few things, but not all of them. And of course, it doesn't charge you or impose arbitrarily limitations to try to encourage you to pay for it while also only doing one specific conversion, too.
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Cool info on the throttled or pay converter scam using the free GPL ffmpeg core with an interface wrapped around it to use as their own. Those would be the ones that I was getting at earlier, but wasnt aware they were using an already freely available tool.
Only other slow conversion I have seen before are trial or demo versions of converters where they throttle them down as a means to get you to register and buy a licensed copy of the converter. These converters sometimes even watermark your video which is sad but its a means for them to get you to cough up the money to buy a licensed copy of the software to then be able to convert the videos faster and without watermark.
About 10 years ago I got scammed by purchasing a Website Downloader tool. And later found out that someone wrapped their GUI around HTTrack which is free to use. Well they got $14.99 out of me and then I tossed their software away since HTTrack was keeping with updates and they weren't, as well as their software had random bugs. ::)
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Remember SoftRAM ? ?
;D ;D
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wow I nearly forgot about that scam ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
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They kinda made a lotta money...
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handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/).
.avi isn't an option in handbrake.
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Oh, I see. It was removed in 0.9.3.
Avidemux may have the capability, I don't know if it can open MKV container files though.
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http://download.oldapps.com/HandBrake/HandBrake-0.9.2-Win32_GUI.exe
I scanned it with Windows Defender, 0 threats found.
Oh, I see. It was removed in 0.9.3.
Avidemux may have the capability, I don't know if it can open MKV container files though.
My Avidemux v2.6.10 from 2012 opens mkv files but doesn't have any avi output format choices. You can get versions of Handbrake back to 0.9.1 (8 October, 2007) at Oldapps.com. I downloaded 0.9.2 and scanned it with Windows Defender and it said 0 threats, but I don't know how much assurance that provides.
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heh, 0.9.2. can output to AVI, but doesn't seem to have a way to input from a .mkv file.
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I have been finding ways of viewing what I can loosely call "downloaded content" on my TV since around 2002. That year I bought an "Ellion" DVD player that could play Mpeg-4 (DivX and Xvid) from burned CD-Rs and DVD-Rs (and -RWs). Whoopee! That lasted about 5 years, started giving awful criss-cross patterning, I suspected failing capacitors somewhere. So I shopped around and got a Panasonic DVD player, same capability plus USB drive support. Now I could put AVIs on a pen drive. No more burning, except for stuff I wanted to keep. All this time I was using CRT TV sets with SCART. Both players had resolution limitations you might expect, so increasingly I was having to downscale some stuff using Virtualdub. Fast forward (!) to 2012. Got a Samsung 32" smart TV, and at the same time, a Seagate NAS with DLNA server. As my wife (who had misgivings) eventually said, "I'm glad you dragged us into the 21st century". Play MKV natively over ethernet. No more burning, no more pen drives. I still have half of a 50-stack of DVD-Rs and a bunch of 2,4,& 8 GB pen drives that I may donate to a museum some day. However that's no consolation to people with legacy hardware. There are honest, free, "ffmpeg GUI" type apps out there, including one called Avanti that I used to use. It's still available. The website says use version 0.9.2. You have to separately get a Windows build of ffmpeg and drop into a particular folder for Avanti to see. You can get and add AviSynth as well if you really want a complex experience. It has a (for me) attractively "busy" interface, but here is what I just did using all default settings::
(https://i.imgbox.com/356G68AI.jpg)
Didn't trouble the CPU unduly (unlike Handbrake). The "message/warning" was just an ffmpeg remark about a deprecated way of passing codec parameters, didn't stop anything:
[avi @ 0000000002663940] Using AVStream.codec to pass codec parameters to muxers is
... deprecated, use AVStream.codecpar instead.
Input mkv (from Youtube using youtube-dl) is 42 MB, VLC says "H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)"
Output avi is 146 MB, VLC says "Mpeg-4 (DIVX)"
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You have to separately get a Windows build of ffmpeg and drop into a particular folder for Avanti to see.
To clarify: it makes no difference if you have ffmpeg binaries somewhere on your PATH, Avanti wants them in its own folder.