Dr Divx

Basically for windows XP , this doctor here makes it quite easy to create DivX (AVI) movies. With standalone DivX players becoming common, Dr DivX is an excellent tool to have.

Features
The interface is quite Intuitive and user friendly, with extreme dearth of menus and buttons you just can’t do it wrong! The doctor supports encoding options like ability to specify final size, cropping video, de-interlacing, etc. You can also prepare multiple files for batch processing.



But it doesn’t allow encoding parts of the movie.



With a very few buttons to play with, finding the right one isn’t any problem. Open the file you intend to encode by using the Open button in the Input File field.

Next you can set the quality/file size options. The DivX certified settings correspond to the following resolutions: High Definition- 1280 x 720 at 30 fps, Portable- 352 x 240 at 30 fps or 352 x 288 at 25 fps, Handheld: 176 x 144 at 15 fps. Quality settings impact on the method of compression and the algorithms used to achieve this. Constraining the output file to a fixed size frees you from further tweaks. You can save the settings you have made under a profile with the Save Settings button, and recall these to be used for the next job by using the Custom Profile option. If you are not interested in tweaking individual settings, you can click on the encode button and be on your way.

The Advanced tab allows further refinement of the encoding output. Under the Processing Tab, you can specify additional options like the cropping range, or choose automatic crop in which case the program will cut the black borders automatically. Doing this you can decrease file size without loosing any quality. You can also change resolution and aspect ratio here.

Noise Reduction is useful in cases where there are too many “grains” in the movie, especially in Home videos. Choose settings accordingly. Progressive output will ensure better results. If “Psycho visual Enhancements” are applied, the Doctor promises to increase the quality of the output by using advanced techniques to detect and improve those areas of the film which will be most noticed by the human eye. Better quality equals more encoding time. Once all the settings are done with, just click the encode button and the job gets sent to the queue, but the process doesn’t start immediately. After that you need to click on the start button to let the doctor operate.

This a recommended program for specially those who seek simplicity and effectiveness foremost.

Media Coder

Media Coder (MC) is a very capable but difficult to use encoder. This is a front end that uses Open Source Video Tools like FFmpeg and Mplayer in the background. Being in its infancy MC needs to be forgiven for the buggy interface it carries. The earlier version 0.3.9 seems to be better than the newer one v 0.5.

It can convert MPEG2/MPEG1/AVI (DivX, XviD)/3GP/MOV/Real Audio/etc., to MPEG2/MPEG1/AVI (DivX)/etc.

Features

MC can even convert into format used in portable viewers like PSP, Mobile phones, etc. Simple encoding from one format to another is quite easy. Use the Add file button to add the source. Set the required encoding options in the boxes at the bottom. Compression can be set depending on what final size you might need or what quality you want. It has even got options for tweaking the audio encoding.

Besides choosing the codec, the video can be further processed to remove noise (white dots that usually show up in amateur video shoots in poor lighting conditions), or to crop the video or resize it. And surely the additional processes will increase the processing time.

If you are just interested in a part of the movie, you can set the time range in milliseconds, here. Since MC does not have an easy way to mark out the ranges, you will need to view the file or another player to set the exact interval. Ensure you have done the math properly or you would end up cutting irrelevant parts.

After all this is done, just click on start button on the top to let the encoding begin.


So all I can say is, This Coder converts anything, like almost.

Video LAN Client (VLC) Media Player

Platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, etc.

It started off as a project to create a video streaming server and playback client. And originally had Video LAN server and Video LAN client for each of the task. But the crossplatform media player gained popularity and soon the server was reduced to a component of the Media player. It’s a highly capable media player and comes with a lot of features.

Features

Playback rate can be increased or decreased, but unlike Media Player Classic, the audio is disabled during altered rate of playback. Contrast, brightness, colour saturation, etc., of the video can be changed easily. Adding effects to the movie, like blurring, cloning, etc., is an easy task since the menu is easily accessible. VLC packs a streaming server which allows streaming any video from any source, like a tuner card or DVD, over the network. A wizard that makes setting this up easy is what keeps it cool. A stream capture client allows you to save any video streamed over a network, including the Net. An inbuilt video editor and transcoder allows saving part of a file in format of your choice. On the flip side, its menu system is bulkier than MPC, and the seek bar doesn’t work quite well either. It has the annoying tendency to skip predefined parts in a clip, and you have to carefully drag the slider to the desired position.

File > open Directory will add all the files in the directory to the Playlist, which can be accessed from View > Playlist. To alter display settings like contrast, brightness etc., got to Settings > Extended GUI > Video. Enable the settings for the changes to have and effect on the movie.

Under the Extended GUI window you can also find the Audio Equalizer. Here also the equalizer needs to be enabled for the alterations to have an effect. A slicker, but less functional, GUI can be used by switching interfaces from the Settings menu. For routine use, the skins2 GUI is recommended, but it doesn’t remember the setting, so you will need to apply it every time you start it.

VLC offers a lot more functionality than any other media player, that puts it in a class of its own. Its inbuilt video encoder lets you crop those parts of a movie that you like. To do this: while playing the file, go to Settings > Bookmarks option. Add bookmarks at the start and end points of the range you would like to save. You can create sets of start and points that you want to extract. Once all ranges have been identified, select each start and end bookmark pair and click on Extract.

This will cause the transcoding wizard to pop up. You can choose to compress the audio and video or keep the original format. Depending on the audio video codecs chosen, the container format options change. Finally select a location and a filename (an extension is not automatically appended) and then click on save.

The only way to know the progress of the transcoding is to look at the movie progress bar. And there is no pop up informing you that the process has ended, so once the progress bar stops, wait a few seconds more and then assume that the process has completed.

VLC includes a Wizard to ease the transcoding and streaming. The wizard can be opened from File > Wizard menu. In the streaming/transcoding Wizard dialog box that opens, select “Stream to network”, after selecting the relevant option, click on Next and choose the relevant video file.

Next, select the protocol to be use for the stream. RTP (Real Time Transport Protocol) can utilize bandwidth better than HTTP. Select the IP address of the machine you want to stream to. If you want to stream to more than one PC, use RTP Mulitcast and set the IP range accordingly. If you would rather people connect to your IP to see the stream, you can do that by choosing the HTTP protocol. In this case, the stream is available at http://your ip:8080 by default. The port number can be changed, if necessary, in the destination address box.

For streaming there is no need of modifying any other parameters, just click on “Next” till the Wizard finishes. Any person wanting to view the stream can use VLC for the purpose. Using File > Open Network Stream option, the stream can be viewed.

The wizard also helps in the transcoding process. After selecting a file to transcode, most of the steps are similar to the ones described before while transcoding a part of the file.