| User review:
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27 year video professional here. I own a high-end production facility and have used expensive encoding solutions like Rhozet Carbon Coder (Now ProMedia Carbon) Telestream Episode, Procoder and others. I also use free and shareware encoders as well...primarily because may of the paid apps are as buggy and convoluted as the open-source ones, and because some of the freebies offer options the paid ones don't (like Apple ProRes support).
Xmedia Recode COULD be the best in it's class if the developer would:
1. Fix the scale/size problem that has plagued the application for over a year (maybe longer).
2. Participate in the forums here and other places where users discuss the app.
3. Answer emails sent to him.
I have it working great on two machines...one a high-end Windows 7 workstation and another an older HP XW6200 workstation running WinXP. However, on every other computer I've ever installed it on (office computer, home desktop, home laptop, work laptop, other office workstations), if you scale a video the app crashes as soon as you start an encode. It works fine if you keep the size the same, so it's a well-documented issue with the FFMPEG scaling library. But the problem has to be in how the developer implements FFMPEG, because the exact same version of it works fine on dozens of other encoding tools, such as Avanti, Tencoder, Format Factory, StaxRip, Handbrake etc.
When it runs on a system, it's nearly as good as apps that cost hundreds of dollars. There are quirks in the interface and its functionality, but if you've ever used Telestream Episode, this tool is no more quirky than that. By the way, we purchased 2 licences (at $1000) of Episode last year. Our experience with it was so bad and the software so unreliable that we asked for (and got) our money back a year later! I can say without hesitation that if you can get Xmedia Recode to run without the sizing bug, it's BETTER than Telestream Episode's regular version and likely as good as their pro version, which costs $1000 per license.
One thing to note, Xmedia Recode is simply a front-end for FFMPEG so it would be easy to blame the sizing crash problem on it, but as noted, dozens of other front-ends use the same version of FFMPEG without this issue, so the problem seems to be in how the developer compiles and integrates FFMPEG into his app.
If he could fix this issue and would participate on forums and ever answer an email (I've sent him several), I dare say he could sell this app for $59 or even higher and make a nice amount of money on it. |
