Friday, November 10th, 2006
Useful Free Software for Video Playback and Format Conversion on Windows
If you ever find yourself needing to do video playback and format conversion with a wide variety of video formats on Windows, I have a few key free pieces of software to recommend:
- VirtualDub: a video capture and processing tool that can very quickly read, manipulate, and write AVI files in many formats (VirtualDubMod, a spinoff, handles even more formats) (Wikipedia description)
- VirtualDub filters: the other great thing about VirtualDub is that there are many plugin filters available that implement a variety of video/image processing algorithms
- ffdshow: a codec (decoder and encoder) package that installs as a native Windows DirectShow filter, enabling playback of many modern video formats in Windows Media Player
- Auto Gordian Knot: a tool for converting DVD video content into XviD or DivX or x264 MPEG4 video
- MediaInfo: reveals the codecs used for video and audio contents within a video file
