free video converter

[bad_brain]

as some of you know I got a new TV (720p one) and so I enjoy watching movies again because the quality is so awesome compared to my old CRT TV.
but my WD Media Player has some issues with HD video formats sometimes, so I had to look around for a good video converter....as you all know there are soooo many of them, and they are either totally complicated because of the loads of options or they simply suck.

but I've stumbled over a really nice open source one that does the job really well, I have transcoded a couple of .mkv videos to .mp4 format already with it and the results are great, no sound lags and the picture quality is still perfect (reduced the size of a 4.4GB .mkv file down to a 1.3GB .mp4 file without any noticeable quality loss).

so if you have to convert videos (especially HD ones) or simply need to save some space on your HDD I can highly recommend "Handbreak":
http://handbrake.fr/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

the only little downside is that it's maybe not the fastest one, to convert a 4.4GB .mkv it took 45 minutes (6-core system) when running the conversion in "realtime" mode (but I only recommend that mode if your system would be idling anyway because it makes it pretty unusable by occupying all CPU resources).

[Broken Angel]

One more link I would like to add in here thou it's not top notch but then it can convert what ever format to any format possible (As far as it was useful to me and I was satisfied with the list).

It converts the format and then sends the link to your mail ID that you had provided before conversion, thou it has two versions like premium and a free one and the downside in here is that it will only convert 100mb of data if your using it for free acccount, but the speed is awesome. Basically I find it better when I use it to convert songs off Youtube and the quality is also the same as the song there

http://zamzar.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hope this is not completely off topic

[skulldragon_001]

Wow, a HD TV finally declared as better than old CRT? I wish we had such picture boxes here. All they sell here is crap. Currently a 2k€ costing flat TV here has up to 10x worser quality, than a 30€ costing CRT TV made in Russia (1990 or earlier). At least one thing I never see again on new TVs: huge bass speaker! Now we just have to buy "that" separately, for up to 400€, and they even dare to call it "home cinema" or smthn.

Anyway, enought about good, old, old times.

Have you used AGK? It's free too and supposedly used by "aXXo".
http://www.autogk.me.uk/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I've used that recently to convert DVDs into 700Mb AVIs.
But I doubt it supports multi-cored CPUs.

[bad_brain]

well, of course it's a little hard to compare when you don't have a CRT with exactly the same screen size. but what makes the biggest difference for me is the availability of digital TV now, via cable and, even better, via HDMI from my media player....the picture quality especially of the latter one is simply amazing....and that with "just" 720p.

but true, the speaker quality of the old CRTs was better, but that's simply because there was much more space available in them....luckily I don't use them anyway (also didn't on the CRT), I run the sound over my HiFi system.


and yeah, I have used AGK earlier when I was ripping the VOB files from my DVDs and transcoded them to .avi so I can use them on my media player (it runs VOB too, but every movie is split into multiple VOBs and so I would have to run each one manually).