Now, let’s explore the 8 video converters at hand. While VLC and mpv are primarily multimedia players they also offer conversion functionality. They are each published under an open source license. Here’s our rating for the best free video converters. And it’s also likely to be illegal as it constitutes a breach of copyright unless the copyright holder has given explicit consent, or the video is published under an open source license.

Please be aware that if you’re converting videos from YouTube, that’s against Google’s terms of service. While transcoding is a very CPU intensive task, modern processors with a high number of cores offer impressive conversion rates provided the transcoding software supports multi-core architectures. Some popular examples include the ability to convert files so that they are supported on a target device, and at the same time removing commercials, and reducing the file size. There are many reasons to transcode media files. Transcoding will reduce the quality of the tracks unless lossless formats are used. It involves extracting tracks from a digital media file, decoding the tracks, filtering, encoding, and then multiplexing the new tracks into a new container. Transcoding is the process of the conversion of digital data (typically video and audio files) from one format to another. Video conversion is a narrower term for transcoding. The best video converters make the conversion process simple, and support a wide number of different codecs and formats. Given there are many different video formats available, a free video converter is an extremely useful piece of software.

Best free video encoders