MediaCoder iPod Edition is a free and excellent H.264 transcoder that will not only transform all your audio and video files into a format that your iPod can play, but also into iPhone- and iPad-compatible files. Its batch capabilities let you convert a large amount of audio and video files regardless of their input format, while its flexibility allows you to define the video dimensions and the overall end quality of all the converted files.
The program includes easy-to-use and self-explanatory utilities to crop and clip your video files, as well as to apply basic effects to improve the final quality of both the soundtrack and the image of your videos. The list of video and audio codecs supported would be far too long to include here – suffice to say that I cannot thing of any well-known video or audio format – either lossy or lossless - that MediaCoder would not be able to convert.
It provides you with comprehensive real-time statistics of the whole conversion process. Actually, the program has a benchmarking option that simulates the proposed tasks just to let you see possible errors, estimated times, and performance parameters before launching a long list of conversion tasks.
One of the features I found more attractive is the fact that its built-in video player comes with preview capabilities. While other similar tool use their own player merely to show you what the original video selected looks like, MediaCoder’s built-in player will let you check what the output video will look like according to the choices you made. Personally, I found this to be very useful when making a decision on which aspect ratio would look better in my iPod’s tiny screen.
The output quality of the conversions the program performs is way over acceptable. If you add to this its high-speed performance and its wide range of customization settings, it is certainly hard to believe that it is a free application that you are dealing with.
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