DVD VideoSoft - A cornucopia of free software!DVD VideoSoft is a company that has produced a whole range of completely free software!
The toolsTheir range includes 23 different tools that are split into seperate segments.
Telling you
all about these is going to be a mammoth task!
Actually
I'm not going to tell you about all of these, I'll use this
page as a central hub to pass details and information about key tools
and then let you go look through the
DVD Videosoft free software yourself Studio manager software This is
actually a manager to control all the free software tools on
this page. It has a nice GUI with a graphical driven menu. This is
downloaded free with any of the tools below and displays the full suite
of products available.
However only those that are installed on your machine are accessible. If you click on one that isn't installed it will invoke the installation mechanism which will add the tool to your PC. Video and audio conversion softwareThis includes tools to convert between the following formats
 Flash is a very popular format for
video loaded onto web pages. It takes
up less storage space and works quicker than other formats, but it's
not very user friendly for editing unless you have a fast machine and
some expensive software. What this tool allows you to do is to create
your video in another format (such as AVI or MOV) using one of the
other free editing tools you'll find on this site, and then convert it
to Flash as a last step.It accepts the following input formats: *.avi, *.mpeg, *.mpg, *.mp4, *.m4v, *.wmv, *.asf, *.mov, *.qt, *.3gp, *.3g2, *.dvr-ms. It outputs *.FLV and *.SWF at various settings according to presets or custom defined settings. There are 3 features I particularly like in this piece of software: 1) The ability to trim files as part of the process. Suppose you have a file you wish to convert but you only actually want the middle 3 minutes rather than the whole 5 minutes. As part of the conversion process you can specify start and end points (using a graphical interface) and the software will take care of the rest. 2) Ability to batch convert. Usually a tool such as this will allow you to specify one file to convert at a time. You define your conversion criteria and hit the button. If you wish to convert another you must repeat the process. The batch conversion utility allows you to define a list of files to be converted at once (using the same conversion parameters) and then the program will work through them one at a time. Very neat 3) HTML Snippet. On completion of the Flash conversion it will then display an HTML snippet which you can use to add the flash file into your web page The interface is simple and neat. The other batch converters are similar in style and functionality to the one explained here. This is obviously a DVD Videosoft standard
YouTube softwareWith the advent of Youtube, the market for consumer created video content has skyrocketed. DVD Videosoft produce two pieces of software to take advantage of this.One piece of software will take your finished video, convert it to Youtube standards and upoad it automatically. (Note that this will cause issues when converting some formats which have already been compressed. Youtube will re-compress your video resulting in 'blocky' and lower quality video. Try to use the highest quality uncompressed video you can when converting to Youtube). This software has an almost identical interface to the other tools we have looked at already and support the trimming and batching function mentioned previously. The other type of software is for taking Youtube video and converting it to other formats that you can use. There are 4 tools that do this. One is a plain Youtube down loader. One downloads and converts to iPod & PSP format. One download and converts to iPhone format (.MP4), and one downloads and just extracts the audio. Again these have an almost identical interface to the other tools we have looked at already and support the trimming and batching function mentioned previously. In reality the software programs are pretty much identical to each other except they have various different presets for outputting. UPDATE: Now there are 3 types of video available on YouTube: - FLV normal quality; - FLV higher quality; - MP4 higher quality (available for iPhone users). When you click a link below the video that says “watch in high quality”, you see FLV higher quality video. But eventually MP4 higher quality is even HIGHER than FLV higher quality. YouTube’s MP4 files encoded with more advanced codec, have a higher resolution, stereo sound and higher audio bit rate. Several days ago the company updated their software and now you can get the highest available quality video from YouTube with these tools: - Free YouTube Download 2.2.2.3; - Free YouTube to iPod and PSP Converter 3.1.2.3; - Free YouTube to iPhone Converter 2.1.3.3. And using Free YouTube to MP3 Converter 3.1.3.2 you can get near audio CD quality sound from YouTube video. Previous versions transform MONO sound to STEREO. Audio and video editing software Dissapointingly the DVD Videosoft free
audio/video editing tools are
rather basic.
Their main usage is for taking a video or audio and removing bits that
you don't like. This is useful if you have recorded something from the
TV and want to remove the commercials, for example.However there is one thing I like about this tool and that's the fact that it rerecords without loss. In other words, once you have removed the bits you don't want the video or audio is saved back to the format you opened it as without re-encoding. The advantage of this is that you don't lose quality. Formats supported. Supports many MPEG files: MPEG 1, MPEG 2 and even MPEG 4 AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, MPG and FLV files including DivX and XviD Supports many audio formats: MP3, WAV, AAC, AC3, M4A, MP2, OGG, WMA DVD decryption softwareDVD Dycryption software is for taking a DVD disk and extracting the video and audio into a format you can manipulate on your hard drive.This is useful for when your friend has videoed his wedding, sent you a copy of the DVD and you decide you want to 'remix' some of the scenes to make him look silly. The software is quite simple and straightforward. You select the disk, select a destination for the video and select an output format. The output formats supported are: AVI, WMV, MP4 and Other Formats (optional) (The optional conversion involves a piece of 3rd party software called AVS video converter) SummaryA well though out and well designed set of free software. The tools can handle most video/audio tasks.My only concern is that the editor is actually a very basic editor, but this is more than made up for with the additional tools for converting and ripping software Here's the link to the main page More software packages will be added in due course. To be informed when this happens, either subscribe to our blog or our eZine
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