7 Best Free Media Converter

The world is full of media devices with mobile phones, desktops, laptops, MP3, MP4 and so on, and we often need to convert between different media formats for pictures, videos and audios for we all may have such experience as being unable to play a just downloaded movie on the device we want to play it with due to format incompatible problem.

Here are 7 free media converters we selected. Some are versatile but could be a little complicated for you, while some may be not so powerful but enough to meet your requirements with very simple interface. Hope you will find the one that works best for you in the below list.

Super—Windows

Super is actually a graphical user interface for different command line conversion scripts like FFmpeg, MEncoder, and MPlayer. It can be a multipurpose program to convert all popular formats of your media files including image, video and audio. It supports extracting the audio part out of the video. Converting a file can be as simple as choosing the right format you want and keep going with the defaults, while it allows you to customize the settings with many options too.

MediaCoder—Windows/Linux with Wine

Belonging to SourceForge former as open source software but now closed source, MediaCoder is a universal media transcoder that converts most of the popular video and audio file formats. It is a feature-full program, a bit of complex for beginners, though.

It not only supports converting a single file but also entire folders, from DVD’s or CD’s and even URL’s or RSS feeds besides from your hard disk, so It is a good choice for working on a large batch of files. Apart from converting feature, it has some additional features including video compression, extracting audio from video files, ripping video/audio discs, and repairing corrupted or partially downloaded video files. It is also available for popular mobile devices like PSP, iPhone/iPod.

However, it is supported by bundling OpenCandy software recommendation service in its installer now, which may make the installation process not so soothing.

Format Factory—Windows

Like Super, Format Factory is also a multifunctional tool to convert all popular video, audio and picture formats to others. You can also rip video to audio file. Its additional features including DVD ripping, supporting Zoom, Rotate/Flip and tags in picture converting, repairing damaged video and audio files, reducing file size and more. The interface is configured with nice icons to let you easily find the converting options and batch conversion is available.

HandBrake—Cross-platform

HandBrake is an open source video converter to convert videos to MP4 or MKV files with MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora video codec. It supports a wide range of video files, including commonly used mkv, flv, m2ts, mp4, wmv, avi, mod, etc., and unprotected DVD .vob files (that includes unencrypted DVDs). It is quite stable and works well with great output quality, which makes it one the most popular converters. It also supports batch conversion but the files must be queued one by one.

Windows Essential Codec Pack—Windows

WECP lets you directly view or listen to almost all of your movies, music and flash files without requirement for converting a file to a different format, which is unique and convenient for it could play any video / audio file with your favorite media player without producing a duplicate file during conversion. It is included in the free and wonderful Media Player Classic player too.

Switch—Cross-platform

Switch is an easy to use audio converter. Aside from supporting all popular audio formats, it has plenty of other features including converting thousands of audio files at once, extracting audio from any media file including video and more.

Any Video Converter—Windows

With very easy to use interface to make the conversion as simple as possible, Any Video Converter can handle all popular video formats including input formats--avi, asf, mov, rm, rmvb, flv, mkv, mpg, 3gp, m4v, vob and YouTube videos, and output formats--avi, wmv, mp4, mpg (PAL or NTSC), MPEG, swf and flv. It can also rip audio out of your video to such audio formats as mp3, aac, ogg, wave, m4a and wma. More features include batch file conversion for you to convert a bundle of videos in any different formats to a single selected format, converting any segment of the original videos by video trimming and merging video clips into a single file.