Handling the various range of audio and video file types can give you headaches every day. It happens very often to need a certain file type and you just go and google like crazy for a (free) transcoder. Media Coder promises to be the solution to your problems, a free universal audio/video transcoder. Let’s see if it can keep the promise.

I needed a quick wma to mp3 conversion and Media Coder solved the problem almost instantly. Now let’s see how it handles video files. I made a recording from my satellite receiver, and the output file is .ts (transport stream mpeg file). The interface is ok, found the “add file” button instantly.

After you select the input file you can choose from the various output formats. I chose to use the xvid codec and the .avi container. You have a few options to tick on the right side panel (if you encode a black and white film I suggest you use the “greyscale” option, it gives the output file very nice contrast). You also get to select one pass or two pass encoding and various other options.

After you get all the options straight just click the “START” button and the encoding begins.

The output avi file was ok, so testing has gone well for the .ts to .avi conversion. Another interesting thing is that this software allows you to tweak even the advanced options in xvid, and that can be quite nice for the advanced users.

Overall this free software behaved quite nicely during the test, so I might use it on a regular basis from now on. The team that released this open source program says that it supports almost any kind of video and audio file. Here’s the list:

-MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
-FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
-H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
- AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
- CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*
* supported as input only

Well, I must say that the list is quite impressive. This is a very promising piece of freeware, I’m very curious to see how it will develop. For now, it’s a very good option for your audio/video transcoding needs. You can download it from here, it’s free!

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If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out!