Simple Video Converter

Simple Video Converter is a frontend for MEncoder, a graphical user interface designed to help you change the format of video files (e.g. AVI, MP4, WMV, MPG) into AVI (DivX or Xvid), DVD (ISO) and MP4 (H264).

This is a portable tool, so installing Simple Video Converter is not necessary. It means that you can place it on a removable device (like a USB flash drive) and directly run its executable file on any computer. More importantly, the Windows registry entries are not altered.

Simple Video Converter packs a user-friendly layout which allows you to import clips via the file browser (the "drag and drop" method is unsupported). Processing multiple files at the same time is possible.

In the file queue you can read information on each item and this includes the file name, size, audio and video properties, output format and status. If you prefer the default settings, then you can immediately proceed with the conversion task by setting the output directory and profile.

Otherwise, the audio and video options can be modified when it comes to the bit rate, frame rate and volume normalization. Unfortunately, you cannot create output profiles or reset settings to their default values.

You can find out the status of the conversion procedure regarding the current position, completed percentage, frames per second and size. Plus, you can stop the encoding process and set Simple Video Converter to keep or delete unfinished files, as well as remove an item from the file list or clear the entire queue.

Simple Video Converter requires a moderate amount of system resources and can take a long time to complete a task (sometimes longer than the duration of the video). It has a good response time and outputs a good image and sound quality. We haven't encountered any issues during our testing. However, you cannot preview videos or change program settings (e.g. set Simple Video Converter to run in the background, select the thread priority). No documentation is available, but the layout is pretty intuitive.