15-Minute Reviews :: FLV to Video Converter v1.18.2.16

Hello everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is FLV to Video Converter version 1.18.2.16 by Moyea Flash Video Software – An application to convert from FLV file format to various tyles of video formats including iPod, PSP, and so forth.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Moyea FLV to Video Converter can convert FLV to various video formats for playback on iPod, PSP, Zune, PC and DVD without any extra codecs. The supported FLV files include On2 vp6 video FLV, H263 video FLV, Nelly Moser audio FLV, MP3 audio FLV and audio-only FLV. The original video and audio quality can be perfectly kept.

With Moyea FLV to Video Converter, you can convert almost all kinds of FLV files to files of other video formats, including AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, MOV, etc. You can import the output video file to video editing software or burn it to DVD and then play on TV. What’s more convenient for you is that, you can transfer the output video to play on your portable devices, like iPod, PSP, Zune and cell phone.”

Quick Pros

• Comes with FLV Downloader (See below for more on that)
• Drag and drop support, batching, watermarking and brightness/contrast controls
• Ability to crop video right in application
• Conversion process relatively quick
• Resulting files decent quality

Quick Cons

• FLV Downloader and FLV to Video Converter could be wrapped into same application for ease of use
• Video auto-starting every time you click on it in list
• Conversion settings could be overwhelming to some
• Could use a trimming feature to take snippets of a video

Expansion

With the rapid growth of popularity of sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe and so forth, the market for programs to allow the downloading and re-encoding has been rapidly populating. Moyea FLV to Video Converter is another part of the market, and it does add a little different angle on things.

The first major difference with this application is that it separates the downloader features from the re-encoding functionality. There are two different applications that come with this package; FLV Downloader and FLV to Video Converter. FLV Downloader is very simple to use. You set up a default download folder, and you either choose automatic mode where the application sits resident in the background trolling for videos in which you’ve played and adding it to its own list, or manual mode which actually allows you to browse for videos and when you mouse over the video, you get a little pop-up button ‘GetIt.’ Click on the button, and it adds it to FLV Downloader. When you’re done your downloading, you can use the Convert button to launch FLV to Video Converter. My only wish is that these two were rolled into one, or one better, would encode automatically after downloading (especially with manual downloads.)

There is a lot of features to this application – Many are becoming more common amongst this this style of application now, but is nice to see here as well. Drag and drop support, batching, watermarking and brightness/contrast controls are the main ones I find are handy here. There is also cropping functionality which is good if you’re taking typical videos and porting them to your PSP or other wide-format players and would like to see them full-screen. While the interface isn’t as intuitive for cropping as others I’ve used, it does offer a little more power than others by giving you numerical controls as well as a simple slider and box controls. Now the only thing missing is trimming for selecting portions of the video instead of the entire video itself.

Once I got the video conversion running, it went pretty quickly. Not the fastest I’ve seen, but still a decent speed. The resulting file turned out pretty good too; Appropriate for the bitrate I chose, which is good. One of my biggest quip with the conversion process is the settings for it; While all the settings displayed is great for someone who is familiar with the process, all the settings definitely could become overwhelming for someone relatively new to the process of re-encoding video. The profiles do help, but I feel that this application could use an ‘Advanced’ tab to control some of the features – Have a ‘Simple’ tab by default that lets you pick what player you want to re-encode the video for, what bitrate you want (and even some feedback on file size too,) and go from there. It wasn’t that bad, I just found it was a little too much – It may be how it is laid out.

One thing I must note on that was irritating with this application, is that every time you click on a file in FLV to Video Converter, it automatically starts playing the video. I feel that this isn’t so much useful at all; To some, it may be good if they downloaded a small farm of videos, but the single-shot snip of the video should be suffice for at least most of the identification process. Allow the user to play it themselves, or at least give an option to disable auto-play.

Final Verdict

While this application is fairly mature, it could use a bit more tweaking for ease of use and overall experience. That said, I actually feel that this is one of the better applications I’ve seen for converting FLV files from online. The FLV Downloader is actually very cool in that unlike other downloaders that require support for each site, this one simply sits and watches for FLV videos and grabs them, or gives you a handy little pop-up over the videos to let you manually download them. That alone made a good difference with this application suite. That said, while free, if you plan on grabbing FLV videos off the ‘net, and you may visit sites that are not specifically supported by other applications, this may be a good freebie. As for $39.95, I feel this is a tad high – There isn’t too many ‘productive’ uses for this application that I can imagine and really should be marketed price-wise more towards those who like to archive their favorite videos. I would feel more comfortable paying $24.95-$29.95 for this application – It’s a decent application, just wrong market for a price point of $39.95.

Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, June 09, 2007