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Posted by ryan | Posted on 13:15

Posted: 04 Aug 2010 02:35 AM PDT

There are various video sharing services, like Youtube or Vimeo, in the web that can host and serve the files for us which is great.

However, there are cases that these services may not be a good fit like "unbranded videos", "custom sizes", a custom player, etc. This is when we usually need to convert/encode our videos to make them ready for the web.

And there are multiple formats like the popular FLV or HTML5 video formats like OGG, h.264 and WebM where you may need multiple versions of the same video for maximum compability.

Here are free video converter applications that support these formats to help you complete this process easily:

Miro Video Converter (Windows & Mac)

A very simple but powerful application to convert any video into MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone, and more.

Miro Video Converter is open source and has presets to convert videos into selected device with the right size + format.

Freemake (Windows)

Freemake is a feature-rich video converter that supports too many formats from avi, wmv, flv or swf to mp3, ogg, aac, wma and much more.

The program also has built-in video editing, photo slideshow creation and burning the outputs to DVD.

Hamster (Windows)

An easy-to-use application with a drag'n drop interface that can convert multiple videos into all popular formats.

It enables you to change codecs, bitrates, frames-per-second for videos and more. Hamster also is a multilanguage software (with 40+ languages).

FFmpeg (Windows, Mac, Linux)

FFmpeg is actually a base for many converters. It is a command line tool to convert multimedia files between formats.

Once setup, it is a handy resource specially for batch processing files. If you're looking for a graphical interface for FFmpeg, check the next 2 items.