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Our life are full of mobile devices like iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, BlackBerry, PSP and much more and watching videos on these big screen mobile devices is more and more common especially as the development of advanced smart phones. However, the video format incompatible problem may bother you especially if you are a quick temper. If  you know nothing about video conversion and you just want a convenient tool to convert the video by a few clicks without taking the trouble to select the corresponding settings one by one manually. Then the following listed apps are what you are seeking for. They have the presets or profiles for mobile devices and they are free. Hope you can find the one that works best for you.

Avidemux

Using Avidemux to convert a video to play in iPhone, iPod, iPod 5.5G, Zune, Sony PSP, and Microsoft Zune, you can click Auto on the top menu and chose the one you want. Then the application will automatically make all settings so that you don’t need to manually make the settings on the left panel. It supports a wide range of import file types including 3GP, ASF, AVI, FLV, MPEG, MKV, MOV and MP4. Besides, it is also a great video editing program; check here.

Auto format option in Avidemux

Auto format option in Avidemux

Xvid4PSP

Xvid4PSP has many format preset options for mobile devices including PSP, PS3, iPod, BlackBerry, iPhone, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, SonyEricsson, Nokia, and Itouch. But it works a bit too slow.

Format options in Xvid4PSP

Format options in Xvid4PSP

Format Factory

Format Factory is a versatile multimedia file converter, converting all popular video, audio, and picture formats to others.  To convert videos to mobile devices, click the option of All to Mobile Device under Video in the main interface and then choose the corresponding device. It covers a very wide range of devices.

profile option in Format Factory

profile option in Format Factory

HandBrake

HandBrke has the presets for iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch. Just select the wanted one and it will do the job quick and great. Supported sources: Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD, and VOB and TS files. Most multimedia files it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode. To make Zune HD in the presets, check here.

Presets in HandBrake

Presets in HandBrake

Videora

Videora has individual converters for devices of Apple, Sony, RIM, Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola, Sonny Ericsson and more. They can convert all popular types of video files.

Videro iPod Converter

Videro iPod Converter

The above listed video converters are the best I pick from all the free converting apps, but if you cannot find one  that satisfies you with the reasons of working not fast enough,output quality not great enough to meet your requirement or any other reason, you can  try a paid video convert. Our video converters can convert various videos to  mobile devices with fast working speed, excellent output video quality and absolutely synchronous video & audio. If you want to directly convert video from encrypted DVDs to mobile devices, check our DVD ripper.

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FIFA World Cup 2010

FIFA World Cup 2010

The spectacular FIFA World Cup is going on and fans are crazy for it these days. Fortunately, even if they cannot go to the scene to watch the tournaments on the pitch, they won’t miss every wonderful moment of this great event with the live broadcast on the TV.

However, you are engaged with something important and cannot sit before the TV to enjoy the broadcast when all fans in the world are crying and cheering with passion and enthusiasm for their star players. Upset and downcast now?

Or you want to savor the splendid moments of the great tournament wherever and whenever in the later days of your life. After all, there is only one time to watch the real scene or live broadcast and TV rebroadcasts are limited. Anyone or anything can help?

If you are one of the World Cup fans who has the above problems, this article may help you: You can record the live broadcast or download the video online and even you can convert the video to play on any mobile device you have, so that you can watch the World Cup anytime and anywhere.

Record World Cup 2010 with Digital Video Recorder (DVR)

A DVR allows you to conveniently record videos from TV to the built-in hard drive and some DVRs even have built-in DVD recorders which let you also save videos forever by burning them onto a DVD media. If you haven’t got a DVR, do some research online or ask for others’ opinion before you buy one.

Download World Cup 2010 Online

There are various World Cup video on video site like Youtube, iFilm, Myspace, Dailymotion and some of them are HD video. Moreover, you can get the videos captured in different angles while the live broadcast has only limited angles. As to the way to download videos online, you can refer to this article.

Convert World Cup Video to Play on Different Devices

If you can watch the recorded or downloaded World Cup videos around with your mobile devices such as iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, etc., isn’t it terrific? Check our video converters that can output videos with optimized quality for the intended device, fast speed and smaller file size (a 90 minutes single World Cup match will take a large space of your limited hard drive).

iPod video converter

iPod video converter

If you have recorded the World Cup videos to DVDs, you can also convert the recorded DVD to whatever format and even to HD video if your DVR is not HD DVR, using TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum.

TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum

TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum

Hope you enjoy this hot tournament with the cool videos conveniently!

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A codec is a device or computer program to encode a data stream for transformation, storage or encryption and/or decode it for playback or editing. Most video software can only work with some formats and if you want it to work with the unsupported formats, you have to download and install the necessary codecs.

There are individual codecs and codec packs that include all codecs. How to choose when you face so many codecs and codec packs available online and your computer may already has dozens of codec files? Following are some points for your to refer to:

1. Install only the right codecs that are needed and do so from individual codecs not from a codec pack. This leaves less chance of different codecs running into each other. You can find all the codecs you’ll need here.

Although codec packs are a quick fix, for you don’t need to find the right one from other places and just one pack gives you all, codec packs may damage existing codecs and systems because too many unneeded things are installed at a time in a machine. So codec packs sometimes cause more problems than they fix.

2. If you are a noob without knowledge of what codecs to install for your specific needs, or you are too lazy to find exactly what is needed and think of installing a codec pack with most codecs to get things done once and for ever, you can install a good codec pack widely regarded as the one with least side effect like ffdshow.

Some formats you can’t find individual codecs for like H264, also use FFDShow. When you install FFDShow, deselect all file types except the only ones you need to decode when configuring; otherwise you can have the same conflicts you’ll find with most codec packs.

3. The alternative to installing codecs for your video player is to use such players capable of playing most formats as KM Player, VLC Media Player and MPCHC, for those uncommonly used formats are not worth installing codecs for. If you need Real or Quicktime player, use Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative that don’t have all the extra components that the official players install. I think the best solution to a problem is to give people what they need not what they want for people may not be always aware of what they need, so I recommend this way which is simpler and easier than installing extra codecs.

For example, you may want to play VOB files on your Windows Media Player which has always struggled with DVD and mpeg-2 playback because Microsoft didn’t want to include licensed mpeg-2 playback in Windows, you can install ffdshow with all codecs, but the better is to install MPEG2 codec like Stinkys MPEG2 Codec for the specific playback of VOBs, and the best alternative way is to use VLC Media Player/ MPCHC for playback the VOBs and almost anything else.

Note: If you don’t want to be bothered with downloading the extra codecs for your video converters or editors to work, check our video converters with all codecs built-in and a bunch of features including simple video editing.

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AVI (Xvid/Divx) format is widely used like in some video sharing websites and digital camcorders. These AVI videos can be played in computer but how to make them play in DVD players with as good quality as the original video quality?

Convert to DVD Format to Burn to DVD

DVDs use MPEG2 which is a lossy codec and need a lot more bitrate than the source Divx/Xvid AVI video to keep equal quality to the source video. For same quality video, Divx/Xvid gives smaller file size than MPEG2.

Therefore, to maintain as good quality as possible, don’t shrink the converted video size. Try to put too many videos on a disc or make the files too small; you will make the disc not watchable. You’d better put one movie/video on a blank DVD and use a good AVI to DVD converter. In this way, you will get the disc with similar video quality as the original video.

Burn DVD with AVI Video and Get an Xvid/Divx DVD Player

Burning the AVI videos directly to a DVD without quality loss and play it on an Xvid/Divx DVD player which is cheap (about $30). If you have many AVI videos to watch on a DVD player, buying such a DVD player will saves your time and money in the longtime. After all, the size of Xvid/Divx video is much smaller and thus a DVD disc can take more moves on it. Also, you don’t need to spend time to convert the video format.

However, you may meet Xvid/Divx DVD player playback problems; please read here first.

Want to watch your AVI videos on mobile devices so as to enjoy your favorite video anywhere and anytime? Check our video converters.

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Although the video codec H.264 takes more CPU power and time to encode than other codec, it gives better video quality and small size and it’s more and more widely used. HandBrake is well-known for doing a good job in encoding DVD to H.264 format, but if you want to find a tool to convert a DVD to H.264 without re-encoding the audio to preserve the original audio quality and save converting time, the following free video converters are recommended to use:

RipBot264

RipBot264 converts from DVD, Blu-ray or any video to MKV or MP4 with H.264 codec. To leave the audio not re-encoding, you need to choose MKV container and it will copy stream for the audio. You can read a detail guide about how to use it.

RipBot264

RipBot264

Tip: RipBot264 can’t take a DVD folder as input, but if you select the first VOB from the VOB set, or the first VOB of the  main movie for just converting the main movie, then RipBob264 will load the other files for you. This is also explained in the above mentioned guide.

MediaCoder

MediaCoder can convert your DVD video to almost all popular formats and allows you to load and batch convert a whole DVD folder . To leave the audio without being compressed, check the box for Copy Audio under the Audio tab.

MediaCoder

MediaCoder

Xvid4PSP

Xvid4PSP converts various videos to AVI, DV, MP4, M2TS, MKV with x264 and XviD video codec. It allows video copy and audio copy:

copy audio in Xvid4PSP

copy audio in Xvid4PSP

Note: To convert you DVD to optimized H.264 video for different video playing devices, you can check our video converters or DVD converters.

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Divx or Xivd with AVI container is a popular format widely used by consumers and accepted by digital players like iPod, MP4 player and hard drive. Thus, you may have a large collection of AVI videos no matter where they are from. Then, if you want to burn these AVI videos to DVDs to play the videos on the standalone DVD player or just to make a backup, you need to convert them to DVD format and then burn to DVD. Following are some good freeware I pick out to convert the AVI(Divx/Xivd) video to DVD format. For convert FLV video to DVD format, please refer to this article.

Since most downloaded avi videos have improper VBR audio encoding, you may need to do a quick audio editing with VirtualDub first. Open your AVI file in VirtualDub. If it gives you message saying “VirtualDub has detected an improper VBR audio encoding in the source AVI and will rewrite…..etc”, then hit OK and under the Video tab choose “Direct Stream Copy” and next under File choose “Save as AVI…” to save the fixed file back to your hard drive. When it is finished, close VirtualDub. If you don’t get that message at opening the file, just close the app. Then begin the conversion with the following apps.

Avi2DVD

Avi2DVD can convert avi/mkv/ogm to a vcd/svcd/dvd. You can read a guide on converting AVI(Divx/Xvid) to DVD with Avi2DVD .

Avi2DVD

Avi2DVD

AVStoDVD

AVStoDVD converts various video formats to DVD formats with high quality output and also supports DVD Authoring, ISO image building, and DVD burning using integrated ImgBurn. You can read a related guide to use it. It also supports batch encoding.

You need to upgrade your computer, better to a quad core system, if you want faster speed or be able to do other things when it is running.

AVStoDVD

AVStoDVD

Tip: Use ‘Add Title’ button or drag&drop your video in the title frame to add the AVI file, not using the ‘Open project’ button.

DVD2SVCD

DVD2SVCD has not been updated for years but still good to convert AVI/DivX/XviD to DVD/SVCD/VCD. Here is detail guide for it.

DVD2SVCD

DVD2SVCD

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If a DVD has many audio and subtitle streams, it may be tiresome to click through a dozen languages on the remote to select to turn on/off the one we use when playing the DVD, and thus would like to disable the needless ones as I talked in a previous article. Nevertheless, someone may want to preserve more than one audio and subtitle tracks when converting the DVD to other formats so as to have options on the audio tracks to hear and the subtitle tracks to display.

Unfortunately, most DVD converter tools ignore that someone may have this requirement and people who wanted to do that had to use several programs to extract the subtitle tracks and then muxed to the converted video file, which was complicated and time-consuming. However, now there are three free programs that allow people to convert DVD to those popular video formats with multiple audio and subtitle tracks. They are HandBrake and HDConvertToX which were updated to have this feature not long ago.

HandBrake

HandBrake converts a DVD folder with H264 or MPEG-4 codec into MKV or MP4 container. Just select the audio and subtitle tracks you want in the Audio tab and Subtitles tab as shown in the following screenshot. But, please note the MP4 container format doesn’t allow more than one sub tracks.

select audio tracks in Audio tab

select audio tracks in Audio tab

select subtitle tracks  in Subtitles tab

select subtitle tracks in Subtitles tab

HDConvertToX

HDConvertToX is aimed for converting video files (vob/mkv/avi/m2ts/ts…) with XviD or DivX or X264 or WMV codec, and mux videos in AVI/MKV/MP4/WMV container. However, it only allows importing a file at a time, not like HandBrake which allows importing a whole DVD folder.

audio and subs selection

audio tracks and subs tracks selection

AutoGK

AutoGK simplifies the DVD to AVI/DivX/XviD conversion process. If you meet video compression error when using AutoGK, please refer to this article.

convert DVD with mutiple audio and subtitle tracks in AutoGK

convert DVD with mutiple audio and subtitle tracks in AutoGK

Note: Don’t forget to try out our video converters that will satisfy your multiple needs with fast working speed and high quality output.

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We sometimes need to split a video into segments so as to, say, upload to share with others on websites like Youtube which has a limit for uploading video of 2GB size and 10 minutes length. Then a video splitter which can automatically do that for you as long as you set the splitting specification like splitting by certain video duration or size will be very convenient. Following are some free software tools that let you split your video file to however many parts as you like at a time.

MKV Merge GUI for splitting MKV

MKV Merge GUI allows you to split the video file by duration as well as by size. You can download the MKV Toolnix here; then install it and run the MKV Merge GUI (mmg.exe). Here is a detail tutorial for using it to spit a large MKV file.

MKV Merge GUI

MKV Merge GUI

The MKV Toolnix is cross-platform, so it is applicable in Windows, Mac and Linux.

VirtualDub for AVI

To split by size in VirtualDub, just specify the size of segments. E.g. if you had a 1GB file and you split by 200mb, you would have 5 segments. This can be done by File->Save Segmented AVI and then get the following dialog box:

split AVI file in VirtualDub

split AVI file in VirtualDub

It can also split by duration but is roundabout. There is an option in the above dialog box to split by max frames. If you know the fps of the video which can be found out using use MediaInfo or VirtualDub’s file information and then calculate the duration to get the frames.

E.g. 23.976 fps footage x 60 seconds/minute x 20minutes = 28771 frames

Tip: Don’t forget to set the video & audio to “direct stream copy” in the Video and Audio tabs on the main menu bar.

Yamb for MP4/M4V/MOV/3GP

Yamb can split MP4, M4V, MOV and 3GP files by duration or size.

split video in YAMB

split video in YAMB

MPG2Cut2 for MPEG

MPG2Cut2 lets you split MPG/MPEG2/MPEG1 video by duration. To spliting a DVD to small clips in order to upload to Youtube, you can use VOB2MPG to join all the Vobsets in the VIDEO_TS folder to get an MPEG2 file of the main movie and then use MPG2Cut2 to cut the file to as many clips as you like (should be 10 minutes clips for Youtube).

Mpg2Cut2

Mpg2Cut2

Note: If you are seeking for ways to split a DVD 9 to two DVD 5, please refer to this article. Or if you want to directionally split your DVDs and at the same time output as whatever format you want, Please check our powerful DVD ripper and the tutorial for its splitting feature.

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AutoGK is a free and good tool to convert DVD to AVI/DivX/XviD format. For its application you can refer to the two articles: Convert Each Episode of TV Show DVD to Individual AVI File and How to Convert TV Show DVD into One AVI File. However, someone has met the following problem when using AutoGK to re-encode the DVD files.

“I have ripped a few episodes off a DVD using DVD Shrink and kept one subtitle stream. All the subtitles are there when I play the IFO files in Windows Media Player but when I load the IFO files into AutoGK and select the subtitle file and export the video, the video has no subtitles, except episode 1. It’s very strange that E01 (episode 1) has subtitles, but E02 and all the subsequent videos have no subtitles.”

Well, this problem is most likely not the fault of AutoGK but the subtitle timings of the DVD. It’s due to the subtitle timings are not reset for E02 and the subsequent episodes. That is, the timings for E02 and the subsequent episodes will begin after the length of the previous episodes instead of restarting at zero. When the episodes are encoded separately, the subtitles for each one begins at zero, so the subs for E02 and the subsequent episodes are already finished when encoding E01 since only the subs of E01 begin at zero. Open the IDX file with Notepad and you can see the timing of each episode.

Following are the solutions to the problem:

Solution one:

Find subs for the episodes online of which the timing problem has been fixed and add them to the episodes using the CTRL/F8 trick.

Solution two:

If the correct subs cannot be found online, use PGCDemux to get SUP files (timings will be correct) for the episodes. Then use SubtitleCreator to convert the SUP files to IDX/SUB (Vobsubs). Next, add the Vobsubs to the episodes using the CTRL/F8 trick.

Tips to use SubtitleCreator:

1.File->Open Subtitle to open the SUP file (Note: SubtitleCreator 2.3 works in opening SUP files, but 2.2 does not work)

2.File->Open Pallette to apply the colors of the subs in the IFOs.

3.You might meet a bug in SubtitleCreator that the subtitle background is not transparent with “white boxes”. In this case, you can use SupViewer to fix the colors and backgrounds.

4.Also you can fix the colors and transparencies in SUP files using DVDSubEdit, or fix the sub colors and position (but not the transparencies) in VobSubs (IDX/SUB) using VobSub. At last, don’t forget to run AutoGK’ Preview before encoding to make sure everything is OK.

SubtitleCreator

SubtitleCreator

Solution three:

Encode all the episodes together to a large AVI file and then split them into separate episodes, but this involves more video conversion to finish the work and may reduce the video quality.

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There are different versions for the video codec Divx: Div3, 4 and 5. Div 3 is not much used nowadays but there are still some DVD released in this codec. Unfortunately, many DVD players do not support all the Divx versions and the LiteOn LVD-2001 DVD Player is one of such DVD players. LiteOn LVD-2001 has the feature of high quality DVD playback with support for many kinds of video format including Div 4 & 5. Thus if you have this player and want to enjoy your Div 3 movies on it, you need to convert the Div 3 to Div 5 or Xvid.

However, if a Divx 3 file is encoded with VBR(variable Bit Rate) audio, the audio will easily get gradually out of sync with the video when you re-encode it. Thus following are the guides to help you convert Divx 3 files that have VBR audios to Divx 5 or Xvid files and keep video and audio synchronizing, using the free video converter  and editor.

Use Dr.Divx

Dr Divx is a free and open source software tool to convert your avi video encoded in Div 3 to Div 5 or Xvid codecs. It can automatically converts the VBR audio to CBR audio and then re-encode the video to Div 5 with fast 2-pass variable bit rate conversons. It also supports AC3 audio if you download and install an AC3 filter separately.

Note: Since Dr.Divx has not been updated for years, it only works with the 6.8.5 divx codec pack installed. It doesn’t support the latest version 6.9.x divx codec pack which is available now on the official Divx website.

Dr Divx

Dr Divx

Tip: If you want better quality, you can adjust the settings by: advanced settings/ Pre-Processing tab /to use the max video resolution (eg using the slide bar); then use the codec tab to set the Rate Control bit rate to 1200Kbps. If you set higher than 1200kbps, the video may not pay fine in some devices.

Use VirtualDub

1.Load the file in VirtualDub that will tell you with a pop-up that the sound is VBR and will cause a skew (out of sync) in the playback.

2.Under the Audio tab, select “Full processing mode” without adding other options.

3.Under the Video tab, select “Compression–Xvid Codec”

4.Under File, select “Save as avi” and select the location to save the converted file.

Note: don’t forget to try our video converters that will convert your videos in different format to high quality Xvid or H.264 videos with guaranteed synchronization of video and audio.

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