What video converter is the easiest to use?

Question

my father-in-law has bought a box that plays videos from USB stick, but some of videos have AC3/PCM audio stream, and the device isn't able to cope with that. It is unfortunately only able to decode MP3 audio stream.

I need some software that he'll be able to run on each video to re-encode the audio and then mux it back into AVI format that the device can play. What do you recommend? Keep in mind that the target user is 60+ years old computer novice, so I can't throw FFMPEG at him and hope it will work :-)

Well, I was thinking that I could write a little windows tool that would just call ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i input.avi -vcodec copy -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 output.avi

should I bother with writing a software or is there a braindead simple tool out there?

Answer 1

I use AllToAvi most of the time. It's kinda old, but does the job. Also, it's free. Warning, it's still single-threaded. (Basically it's a gui for mencoder.) Definitely worth a shot.

Another software I like is AviDemux. Free, open-source, multi-threaded. A bit harder to learn (its simple to be honest but got options and stuff.. no mac style).

I heard about MediaCoder but I don't know what it's supposed to be. It's like a fronted for ads. Very strange/fishy.. I just can't trust that software.

Answer 2

I personally use VirtualDub and its derivatives (I especially like AVIDemux2), but I constantly see people recommend and swear by SUPER © as an easy-to-use, yet versatile video conversion program.

Answer 3

In the end I've wrote a simple GUI utility that uses FFMPEG, and in fact I did it faster that it would take me to evaluate all of these converters. Strange market, these video converters software...