15-Minute Reviews :: Wondershare Flash to Video Converter v1.1.5

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Wondershare Flash to Video Converter version 1.1.5 by Wondershare Software – An application to take Flash files and convert them to various video formats.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Wondershare Flash to Video Converter is an outstanding software program that can convert Flash to video files. This Flash converter supports a wide variety of video formats including AVI, MPEG, MP4, 3GP, WMV, and so on. It even supports converting Flash to MP3.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is very clean – Four buttons along top stick out but fit in
• Ability to pull from Internet Explorer’s cache handy
• Batch functionality
• Cropping and image watermarking functionality – Watermark can be manually positioned
• Presets for a variety of players
• Conversion speed was adequate for settings chosen
• Resulting video is good quality – Colors a bit washed out

Quick Cons

• Crashed on clicking on ‘Edit’ first time
• No Firefox support
• No text watermarking
• Crop window should be able to play back to see if application is catching screen bleeds
• Should be more presets than there is
• Could deal with an option to disable live preview if it would speed process

Expansion

With the age of Flash files online taking precedence over embedded video files due to capabilities and sizes of Flash files, its no surprise there is a market for converters to work with these formats. There are plenty of people who may be looking for a quick way to convert their professional Flash files into a format compatible with their clients or employees players, or individuals just looking to archive their collection in a different format.

First off, I found the interface very clean and easy to navigate. The main window has 4 large buttons; Import, Edit, Options and Convert. They are bold as to be easily seen, bit still fit nicely in the theme. The left side below the buttons is the batch list window, showing all of the files in the current batch. The right displays the preview and controls. The interface is easy to use; Each one of the buttons pops up a window to do what you need.

There are plenty of features to fit most people’s needs in this application. The ability to pull from Internet Explorer’s cache is handy in itself to help you pull all your recently-viewed Flash files – This can ease the load considerably for pulling videos from a website. The only downfall here is that there is no support for other browsers such as Firefox, Opera or otherwise.

As mentioned briefly before, there is also batch functionality as well. You can queue up multiple files if you have a large collection and convert them all, for example if you were exporting them to your iPod. With this, you can also have your computer shut down; Handy to save a little computer life and some power as well.

On the ‘Edit’ page, there is both the common crop capabilities for the video (Including dragging- and numerical value-based setting) to aid if you’re trying to remove a pesky bleed that ended up on the screen or a control strip you want to remove. There is also graphical-based watermarking (sorry, no text watermarking) as well; You can set the opacity, as well as manually set the position of the watermark via drag and drop right in the preview window. My only other downfall I found about the edit window is that there is no ‘preview’ – It only shows the black frame and no controls for playback at all. It could make setting a crop difficult at best, and placement of a watermark awkward if you want to ensure it doesn’t sit on anything critical.

When you get down to the ‘Options’ page, you’ll find that there are some presets and a lot of options below that. My biggest quip is that there should likely be more presets and supported formats in my opinion. Granted, the iPod setting can also handle the PSP, a 3GP setting for many cellphones, as well as AVI, WMV and raw audio MP3 output, I was hoping that there would be MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 as well for starters as well as other output settings (Such as AVI – It only has xvid output – A less-common format.)

Finally, coming down to conversion. The speed was adequate (borderline too slow but was okay for the high settings I chose) – It seemed that it ran at 1:1 on two Flash files I converted; I would have hoped for more speed, but if it would be a sacrifice of quality, I would rather not then. The resulting video quality was above average compared to others I’ve tried in the past; The color washout was barely noticable – Others ended up fading quite a bit.

I did have a few issues however besides what was noted above. The first time I tried to enter the ‘Edit’ page, the application hung for a while and then simply crashed with no error messages. I’m not sure what that was, but I’ve yet to be able to reproduce it with the same file, so may have been an isolated incident. I would also like to see the ability to disable the live preview in the main application as well as while converting, especially if during converting I could see a benefit of faster speed; I don’t necessarily need to see the preview while converting; The progress bar is good enough for me.

Final Verdict

While the application does as what it is supposed to do and results in good-quality files, there could be some speed benefits as well as some improvements in how some of the functionality works (Give us Firefox support too). That said, while free, if this is what you need then I would recommend picking it up now. The developer does offer an option to be able to get full support as well as future upgrades for $20, which may be a good deal if you find a lot of use out of this application. As for $39.95, I would find it difficult to purchase this application with the minimal presets available specifically and the few other unpolished points; If you do have an iPod you’d like to port your Flash files to, it may be worth it to you. To a business, it may be more difficult to support an AVI file which sits in a codec that’s not common to business-class systems, and WMV may not be the best answer to this issue either.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, July 23, 2007