How To Convert Video Formats For All-OS Use

These days there are more than a few folks who have Windows-only PCs and nothing else. Several of you own Macs and/or Linux computer boxes aside from your Windows computers (or maybe none at all).

A problem that presents itself is video. WMV and AVI do not "play nice" when outside of Windows. This is due to things like codecs and such. In addition, video made in Linux or Mac OS X also can have a hard time playing correctly in Windows.

The solution to this problem is to use a video format that all the operating systems recognize, and that is the MP4 (sometimes seen as M4V) format.

But what do you use to convert your existing video? Fortunately there’s a free tool that’s up to the task. It’s free and it’s called Handbrake.

Handbrake is available for Mac OS, Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora and of course there’s source code if you have the knowledge to compile it yourself.

Fortunately this software is stupidly easy to use. All you have to do it input the file by clicking Source, then hit Start and it will convert to MP4. No fuss, no muss.

This is what it looks like in the Windows environment:

Click Source and choose your file, then click Start next to it. It’s that easy.

The best part about Handbrake is that you literally don’t need to know anything else aside from what I just told you above. Yes it will recognize WMV and AVI and MOV and OGG and OGV and whatever else you can think of. Being it runs on multiple platforms it will convert just about any video format to MP4 which all OSes universally recognize and play with no problems.

If you need a player for these files, that’s not a problem either, there’s VLC which also runs on all modern OSes.

Do you use video clips at all and hop between OSes? You need Handbrake and VLC. Both are free, both easy.

Handbrake: www.handbrake.fr
VLC: www.videolan.org/vlc