| User review:
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Ease of use is 5 because it allows access to ALL the settings for all the codecs it supports, including the ones that require an engineer to understand, such as qunatizers, groups of pixels, and other such settings. In most software these are automatically determined (educated "guessed") by the software encoder, but in XMediaRecode they are fully settable by the user. Usually I just use the ones I understand such as "frame rate" and leave the rest at default. If you just ignore the advanced settings and don't bother to try to figure them out, then ease of use becomes a 10.
What hurts the ease of use category, gives the functionality category a 10/10! Again though, using the more advanced settings will require an engineer who's familiar with the inner workings of a given codec to determine the correct settings for converting a given video. So to the average user, I again recommend just sticking with the basic settings, and if you have to wonder "what does this do" then just don't mess with it.
Value for money is a 10/10, cause it's FREE!
Overall score = 3. This "overall" takes a hit, because of a category that isn't in the ratings. That category would be reliability (freeness from bugs). And let me tell you right now this software is ANYTHING but reliable (if a reliability category existed, I'd give it a "1"). FLV files saved from Youtube are like PULLING TEETH to just get it to convert without spontaneously crashing during the conversion. Even worse, is that it's conversion bugs are completely illogical. Converting FLV (h264 video in FLV container) to AVI (any codec) directly causes it to crash, but if I first convert the FLV file to MPEG2 (MPEG2 video stream in MPG container), and then convert the MPEG2 to AVI (any codec), it works perfectly. It seems that the internal state is not consistent, depending on what decoding was done prior to the reencoding.
I'm not sure how the program works internally, but the most sensable solution would be to have it convert any video input into a series of raw RGB24 images in memory, and then encode the raw image date into whatever the destination format is. That way it won't matter what the original encoding was, because when rencoding it will be working with raw images as if it was creating the output video from scratch (from a series of BMP images).
Unfortunately in an effort to optimize memory use (so you wouldn't need 4gb of ram for every minute of video), the author of this software has sacrificed reliability |
