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According to the latest update, one won’t play on your TV, another is too large for email, and a third won’t import into your editing programs. When that happens, a good video converter can save you a lot of frustration. Video formats can be a mess.
As part of the ongoing story, if you need to convert a video so it plays on another device, takes up less space, or works in your editing programs, these are the two free tools I recommend most:.
In a fresh development, it’s a free, open-source video encoder that converts almost any video into modern codecs such as H.264, H.265 (HEVC), AV1, and VP9. HandBrake is the one I go to when my goal is to shrink video files without giving up much quality.
In a fresh development, just load your video and choose one of the built-in presets before converting. There are presets for phones, tablets, YouTube, and general playback, so you rarely need to change the advanced settings. It also supports batch encoding if you have multiple videos to compress. It keeps things relatively simple.
As part of the ongoing story, if you’re running out of storage or trying to meet an upload size limit, HandBrake is where you should turn first.
Industry observers note that think of it as a toolbox for working with media files. Built on FFmpeg, it supports an enormous range of video, audio, and image formats along with dozens of production tools. Shutter Encoder has a bit more going on under the hood and compression is only one piece of what it does.
The report highlights that you can trim clips, merge videos, extract or replace audio, crop footage, generate subtitles, normalize audio, convert image formats, and much more—all from the same interface.
Industry observers note that if you regularly edit, convert, or prepare media files for different projects, Shutter Encoder is the more capable tool. Personally, I keep both installed because each excels at a different job. If you mostly want smaller video files, HandBrake is the better pick.
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In a fresh development, when he's not on the hunt for the best computer deals he's covering VPNs, productivity programs, laptops, and a wide gamut of consumer-grade devices and programs. Sam Singleton is PCWorld's VPN beat reporter and jack of all trades.