General Purpose Conversion Utilities
Audio and video files come in many varieties and settings within them. More are being released monthly and you often need to convert from one type to another.
Movie Maker was developed to work great with DV tapes (digital8 or mini-DV) with the camcorder connected to the computer by firewire. But, as of February 2009 my local Sams Club no longer sells such camcorders. They carry only DVD, hard-drive and flash card camcorders. With few exceptions the files on them need conversion before using in Movie Maker.
My newest camcorder is a Sony HD model that saves AVCHD files to a hard drive. The files work with Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 on my Windows 7 computers but need file conversions to use in classic versions of Movie Maker.
The explosion of available online files has many users wanting to convert downloaded flash files to ones that work in Movie Maker. And, afer saving a movie to DV-AVI or WMV format, the only choices available, getting it someplace else such as a video DVD or an iPod video requires yet another file conversion.
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I tend to use specific software tools to do each kind of conversion. Others use tools that offer a free and easy one-size-fits-all process.... but for whatever reason(s) such tools often fall short when delivering their promises.
The pages of the Import Movie Source Files > Video section cover suggested conversion tools for specific file types. This page covers my recommended general-purpose conversion utilities.
All-Purpose Conversion Tools
As time passes there are more choices of cameras, camcorders, webcams, phones, screen captures, and other video taking devices. And there are more types of digital file formats and compression codecs. Many or most of the files don't work in Movie Maker without doing a file conversion. The new Windows Live Movie Maker promises to resolve the disparity, but we are still waiting for it to be published. And it won't work in XP.
There's a couple main approaches to file conversions:
As file types and codec choices keep expanding, so do conversion tools. I've never found the perfect all-purpose tool, so my website pages lean more toward tools that make specific conversions. They usually need more learning about specific settings to use than all-purpose ones, but results are consistently good. If you have the time to learn and your preference is for 'free software' they offer the best options.
The Xilisoft Video Converter was the first general purpose converter I endorsed.... but when I ran a number of tests on Jan 16, 2011 I found .wmv files from the conversion process had a frame rate of 25 rather than the 29.97 fps that my NTSC camcorders shoot at. I suggest checking the file types you typically use with the trial versions of all-purpose converters before purchasing.
As of May 2001 freemake's Free Video Converter is my recommended all-purpose conversion tool. I've found it to be very robust in the variety of file types it converts from and to, and good at most conversions... with this short list of items to be aware of.
freemake's Free Video Converter
Here's an article I published at Bright Hub about the details of my testing.
I'm studying other all-purpose tools such as the 'free' Quick Media Converter... it's good but doesn't do as many file types as Xilisoft's converters, and does less of a quality job, such as not retaining widescreen settings.
I see the free Format Factory being suggested by John Inzer, always a quality source. My first test files using v2.15 were a VOB and two AVCH HighDef files, converting them to WMV files that played fine in WMP. The app is available at
SUPER is routinely recommended by neophyte at windowsmoviemakers
It works well on my 32 and 64 bit Windows 7 systems. It's a free download and has features that go beyond conversions... such as simple editing, and making video DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.