15-Minute Reviews :: Plato Video to FLV Converter v4.78

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Plato Video to FLV Converter version 4.78 by Plato Software Inc – An application to convert various video files to the FLV format.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Video to FLV Converter is a great software useful for anyone interested in latest Internet developments, such as popular online video sites (YouTube, for example). It enables you to convert almost all types of video files to Youtube FLV video. With Plato Video to FLV converter, you can avoid lots of conversion problems and get perfect and professional flv files without losing quality. Simple settings, high conversion speed, and friendly interface – all in Plato video to FLV Converter.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is all a one-page easy-to-use interface except lack of drag and drop
• Wide range of settings to choose from
• Trim controls available right on the preview slider (A bit hidden)
• Processing of files is quick

Quick Cons

• All presets are marked YouTube formats – No way to create custom presets
• Help manual for Plato Video to iPod
• Defaulted to D:\ for output which caused crashes
• Converting a few .MP4s resulted in 0-byte files
• Seemed to get an audio syncronization issue often

Expansion

The interface to this application is common to many other conversion applications. You will be greeted by a one-page layout featuring the table of files added at the top with three buttons on the side of the table to add/remove images; and below the file control table is a box displaying the output directory. Below this on the right you will find a preview window, and to the left is the output settings. As with other converters like this application, there is no way to change the presets so you will likely find yourself relying on the custom settings option often. Speaking of the presets, this application is geared towards selling itself (as noted by the description above as well) by advertising the fact that YouTube uses FLV files for its final storage; This is highlighted by all the presets being called YouTube FLV. There is plenty of debate on whether or not you should use a pre-converter before YouTube’s process.

Even though all the settings are in the form of drop-down boxes, there is quite a few options available nonetheless for outputting your file. Granted, it would be nice to have a more granular control over the conversion process, there is enough options to keep most happy here.

Opening the help file, instead of a helpfile for Plato Video to FLV Converter, there was the helpfile for Plato Video to iPod converter; Granted, the applications are likely identical with different formats supported, its just the matter that the correct manual wasn’t included. In the manual was a part on trimming the video and sure enough it is there – It may be an idea for the author of the application to change the start and end of the progress bar to look more like the common trim arrows instead of curly braces.

Testing was a bit of a mixed boat of results. After queuing up the first few files and trying to record by the default settings, the application kept crashing. The issue was that the default output directory is do D:\ which is quite commonly the CD-ROM. The manual for Video to iPod shows in its screenshots D:\ as well, which does pose an odd question of why would that be a good default location? After fixing this issue, then conversion seemed to go well. One of the files queued up seemed to go very fast, and in checking the resulting file it was discovered that the file was 0 byte length; Nothing converted. The file was an .MP4 file which worked fine playing by itself. After trying a couple more .MP4 files, it seems that conversion of the MP4 format isn’t working fully. After opening a few of the other videos in two different players that from the WMV, AVI and MPEG-2 files also tested, only the MPEG-2 file didn’t have audio synchronization issues in the resulting file. After testing a few more files, it seems that only the MPEG-2 worked decently for audio synchronization. On the pro side, the application is extremely quick in converting.

Final Verdict

While the interface is the common stylish and easy-to-use interface that is common to all the one-page converters, its engine seems to be weak in its quality. While this application is clearly geared towards YouTube (Which is a good place to market an application like this due to the sheer volume of videos there), those who may benefit more are those who actually host their own FLV files, if the application did work better. For free, I would likely steer people around this title until it cleaned up its act a bit. As for paying $25, as with the free comment, I really couldn’t recommend this title in the state which this application is currently in – It’d be good for this price if you handled FLV a lot and it wasn’t having the issues noted above.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, January 09, 2008