Description: Debut Video Capture is a free video recording software that can capture video and audio from any USB device, and can also record anything that is displayed on-screen such as a video that is playing or a user’s visible on-screen activity. Supports a wide variety of output formats and encoders.

I was recently faced with the need to make videos of a user (me) interacting with a site that we’ve created at work. This presented me with the opportunity to do some research and find a good screen-recording program; the last time I’d posted something like this was the Krut Computer Recorder way back in April 2007, but since then there seems to have been a proliferation of good free options. I decided to post this program because it is simple and straightforward, extremely easy to use, and offers a good number of output encoders and formats. Here are more notes on this program:

• Input sources: you can record any input coming from a USB video input device (including a videocam with USB input). You can also record your visible screen or a sub-section of the screen.
• Defining an area of the screen to record: is extremely easy; click on the "select a desktop rectangle tool" and draw a rectangle anywhere on screen. Debut will only record that area and any visible events that take place within it. Alternately you can click the "capture the whole desktop" button to record the entire screen.
• Output: can output in a variety of formats, including AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, 3PG, MP4, MOV, and FLV). You can use a number of encoders which the program - I believe - installs (including DV video), as well as any encoders that you might have installed on your system (e.g. I installed an Xvid encoder and was easily able to use it to encode video screen captures with Debut).
• Editing output: you can resize the output video on the fly while recording and/or change the framerate to something that you set manually.
• Video effects: you can apply a number of filters on-the-fly (black and white, negative, sepia), and also have the option to change output color settings (brightness, contrast, gamma).
• Text annotation: also supported is adding an on-screen text message that is present across the entire video. You can choose it’s on screen placement, alignment, whether or not to use a background color, font, font-style, and font size, etc. The program also allows for variable date and/or time stamping.
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Description: this posting will provide a number of mini-reviews for freeware programs written by the amazing Dirk Paehl: SimplyZip, DP MediaInfo, IndexMaker, and UPXG.

I received an email from reader Christ T (CT) which had insightful things to say about a number of freeware titles written by Dirk Paehl. CT kindly allowed me to use his mini reviews as a posting.

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CT: “Purely by accident (I was searching for a “GUI UPX-er”) I came across a website full of Outstanding Freeware Programs, from a guy named Dirk Paehl (visit his site here).

He has a LOT of nice SMALL programs, notably:

• SimplyZip: 2.22 MB Multi-Archive Tool, with GREAT Encryption ability, spanning/multi-zip, supports Many, MANY Archive types, and it can even run Portably! It’s directory looks like “Universal Extractor”, but it can Create as well as Extract, and more - Very Nice! (screenshot above).
• DP MediaInfo: 0.54 MB, kind of like “GSpot”, only much more comprehensive, IMHO! [Note: for a full Freewaregenius review of the related MediaInfo, go here].
• IndexMaker: 187.28 KB (yes, ’KB’!) & CDtoHTML, 208.35 KB - Which create HTML from Files & Folders and from CD’s/DVD’s (respectively), very handy for cataloging.
• UPXG [UPX Graphical]: the reason I found his site, only 372.55 KB (with Docs & Uninstaller); It’s a Single-File GUI for UPX, but with the UPX 3.03 ’Engine’ BUILT-IN to the single 351 KB ’EXE’ file, Totally Stand-Alone or with optional Shell Integration, plus many other options - I still haven’t figured out how the heck he did it, UPX is 265 KB by itself! Maybe his brain thinks at Machine-Language Level? Beats “UPX Shell”, “UPX Front End”, or “UPX Tool+” - Scary Efficient!

I really like UPXG & SimplyZip particularly, and have been using them a lot lately, with no problems at all.  SimplyZip and Pismo File Mount are working beautifully together. Read more »

Description: BitRipper is an integrated DVD ripping and conversion program that provides AVI or Mpeg creation from DVDs in a single step.

I’ve been making terrific conversions of DVDs into video files using all freeware tools for a long time, my programs of choice in this regard being AutoGK and more recently Handbrake. Both of these, however, will start processing your files from the DVD/VOB files after the DVD encryption/protection is removed using another, external, program and in most cases after the DVD had been saved (”ripped”) to your hard drive. What BitRipper offers is an integrated solution that consolidates the ripping and conversion parts into a single process, and then attempts to make it as simple to run as clicking a single button.

BitRipper started life as a commercial product that only recently became freeware. Note that in my evaluating this program I will be implicitly comparing it with Handbrake (mentioned above).

What I like about BitRipper: some cool features

• Decrypts and converts: combines the DVD decryption and conversion processes, so that you no longer have to think of these as two distinct parts requiring different programs. More convenient but also will save you a lot of time and manual involvement with the process.
• Handles any DVD: whether its a normal 4.7 Gig size or a double density 8 Gig+ DVD. “Decryption” mentioned above means that BitRipper will copy most commercial, copy-protected DVDs (includes “3rd party” CSS decryption module. (I am guessing that some very recent DVDs might have protections that it will not be able to decrypt).
• Converts on the fly: i.e. does not save the DVD to your hard drive first and therefore does not require gigabytes of free space on your hard drive to run.
• Installer includes codecs: installing BitRipper will also install a number of codecs that you need to perform a conversion, but the program will also use any codecs that you might have pre-installed on your system. I would advise downloading and using the LAME MP3 codec which provides better audio quality options than the included MP3 codec.
• Simplicity: the program is designed to suggest a simple, 1-click conversion (see screenshot above), where you merely insert a disc and press a button. My experience, however, is that this is the case if you do not want/need to customize the conversion settings, at which point things can become both complex and confusing.
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Description: Flash this! is a small, free tool that can convert video files to flash (both FLV and SWF).

This program is a frontend to FFMpeg, the transcoding engine behind the majority of freeware video conversion programs. Here are some notes on this one:

• No decisions to make: except whether you want to convert to FLV or SWF. No resizing, changing aspect ratio or bitrate, etc. This is part of why I like this program. The resulting video will have the same resolution, aspect ratio, bitrate … etc, as the original. For a more ’transformative’ FLV conversion use Super, Internet Video Converter, etc.
• Super fast: probably because it is not re-encoding individual video and audio tracks but simply creating a new container.
• Supports SWF: which is simply fantastic, and another reason why I decided to feature this program on Freewaregenius.
• Memory use: a nice compact 8 megs.
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Description: FLV Extract is a free program that can save video and audio files from FLV files in their original formats without decompressing or re-compressing.

If you weren’t aware of it, FLV files are containers that house audio and video files which may be encoded in any number of formats. FLV Extract gives you the ability to unpack the video and audio files without needing to re-encode or re-process.

This little program will be very useful if you (a) are downloading music from music-sharing sites in the FLV format, or (b) need to demux the audio or video from FLV files.

Converting FLVs to MP3s is possible using a number of programs such as Super or Any Audio Converter; however, these will perform re-encoding operations which take time and in most cases require that the user make a number of quality and format decisions. With FLV Extract, however, the extraction happens in a flash and is almost instantaneous, and the files retain the format and quality with which they were encoded. Here are more notes on this program:

• Nothing to install: just unzip and run.
• The UI: a simple dialog with 3 options: extract video, timecodes, and audio. All you need to do is to drop files onto the app for processing.
• Performance: you can drag multiple FLVs onto FLV Extract and they will be processed immediately within the space of a second (or a few seconds at most).
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Description: Amok DVD Shrinker is a free program that can compress decrypted DVDs to smaller, user-defined disk sizes without any noticeable reduction in quality. It is designed to enable the copying of commercial DVDs stored on nonstandard media in order to fit them on a standard 4.7 gig writable DVD.

Imagine the following scenario: you’ve just successfully decrypted a DVD and copied it to your hard disk, but when you try to burn it to a DVD you realize that the decrypted data exceeds the 4.7 capacity of your burnable media and will not fit.

If this has happened to you then Amok DVD Shrinker is what you need. Not only will this program quickly and easily compress the DVD on your hard drive into any size that you want with no apparent loss in quality, but it will also preserve all the elements of the original including menus and extra features (or, otherwise, if you specify that you are only interested in the main title it can do that as well).

More info on this program:

• The User interface: is simple and straightforward, with only a limited number of decisions that the user is asked to make (see below).
• Performance: in my test, Amok DVD Shrinker successfully compressed a 6+ gig DVD into 4.7 gigs in 20 minutes (with the quality/speed slider pushed past the mid-point to favor quality over speed, and the preview window enabled). The Amok site states that Amok DVD Shrinker is faster than the well known DVD Shrink, and although I did not scientifically compare these two under the same conditions I remember that DVD Shrink, hitherto the freeware standard bearer for this kind of task, typically took hours to process anything, not minutes.
• User input: the user is only required to make 4 decisions, as follows; (1) the desired output size (e.g. 4.7 gigs for a normal DVD), (2) whether you want the only main movie or the whole DVD with menus and features, (3) whether you want all the different language tracks included or select a singe audio track from the dropdown, and (4) the user’s preference for speed of processing vs. performance on a 5 point scale.
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Description: MediaCoder Audio Edition is a free, full-featured audio conversion program that can both read and write to almost all popular audio file formats as well as audio streams in video files. MediaCoder AE contains all the necessary codecs it needs for encoding/decoding audio within the standalone software.

I’ve been looking for an all-around audio conversion solution for some time now after discovering that my previous staple audio converter (Any Audio Converter) inexplicably did not support some common audio formats; namely FLAC, APE, M4A (the ITunes default format) and M4B. MediaCoderAE, on the other hand supports these formats and more; in fact, the strength of this program is the sheer breadth of the supported formats (really everything you might imagine, although ironically not FLV, which Any Audio Converter actually supports).

MediaCoder Audio Edition is based on MediaCoder, a global transcoder (i.e. converter) program that handles both video and audio. What makes this program noteworthy is (a) the range of formats supported, as mentioned above, and (b) the range of available options/functionalities, which is quite ambitious. Here are some of the features offered:

• Audio conversion: can be done on the fly or in batch.
• Volume Gain: you can add audio volume gain for the group of tracks that you are converting (i,e. raise the volume by a certain level). This can be helpful if your source file’s volume is too low.
• Audio normalization: is offered as an option. This will raise/lower volume gain to conform to the average, eliminating any sudden disparity in volume across different tracks.
• Metadata: can be preserved across different formats after conversion; an excellent feature that is sometimes overlooked.
• Demuxing (i.e. extracting audio from video files): another great feature.
• Renaming: MedacoderAE can rename audio files for you using the files’ metadata based on a number of user defined rules. It can also sort files within a folder structrue based on this (e.g. send all tracks from the same album to a folder, similar to a program such as Id3ToFolder). And while this is nice to have I prefer a metadata manager such as Mp3Tag to do this sort of thing personally.
• DSP plugins: MediaCoderAE allows you to use DSP signal processing plugins from WinAMP. It comes pre-loaded with the ’Enhancer’ plugin, which you can optionally enable. (I did not test this myself).
• Input options: can process files, audio tracks from DVDs, or URLs
• Audio Joining/Splitting: seems to be supported, but didn’t work for me (see wish list below).
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Description: Internet Video Converter is a free program that performs video conversions (including FLV and SWF formats), downloads from a wide range of video sharing sites, and can also play/view a wide range of formats. IVC is a GUI frontend for a number of free tools and is available as an installable version, a portable zipped version, and even as a U3 USB key (.u3p) version.

What I like about this program is that it is self-contained; it includes all codecs/filters that it needs. In fact you could use the no-install zipped version to convert and play a wide range of video formats without writing anything to the registry or having codecs installed and running in the background at all times (consuming resources or potentially causing conflicts with other codecs).

IVC is a frontend that uses FFmpeg or Mencoder to transcode most video/audio formats, Mplayer to play video, FLVtool2 to process FLVs (which is why converting to FLV/SWF is handled separately from other video formats), as well as other tools. It uses Downloader.net to download videos. The rest of this review will contain the following sections (1) Formats supported, (2) Video conversion, (3) Downloading videos, (4) Demuxing audio, (5) Video-to-flash, and (6) Video playback.

(1) Formats supported: FLV, SWF, Vcd/Svcd/DVD, MP3G, MP4 (Ipod, PSP), 3GP, MOV, AVI, and WMV.

(2) Video conversion using IVC: a number of pre-defined profiles are implemented that you can select from, including Ipod, PSP, and 3GP (mobile) formats. When you select a format IVC defaults to a 1:1 aspect ratio which will resize your video to the new maximum resolutions of your selected formats but will keep the aspect ratio of the original. For example if you are converting a source that, say, has a 608×256 resolution and choose the 320×240 Ipod MP4 preset from the dropdown, your video settings will be defaulted to 320×136 in keeping with the aspect ratio of the original. This for me is really exciting stuff because it avoids the blind resizing to 320×240 (or 640×480) Ipod formats that some converters default to which in many cases completely messes up the aspect ratio of the source video.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 1.06

Description: DivXMachine Shell Integrated (DMSI for short) is a free program that can convert images, audio files and videos across multiple formats straight from the Windows Explorer context menu.

Two things that make this program unique (a) all operations are done straight from the context menu; it does not have an user interface, and (b) it handles images, audio files, as well as videos. You can enable/disable file types, as for example to enable image and audio conversions only but not video. Here are some notes on this program:

• User interface: DMSI is built such that all decisions you need to make when converting a media file are streamlined into the context menu. It works really well; all you need to do is follow the unfolding ’tree’ of choices all the way to the end (see screenshot).
• Mux/Demux: i.e. add or extract an audio track to a video file. You can Demux AVI, OGM, and MKV container formats and mux AVI with up to 2 audio files.
• Batch encoding: you can perform operations on multiple files by selecting them simultaneously then performing the operation via the context menu. Note that all selected files have to be of the same type (i.e. all of them images, videos, or audio files) and that there will be a singel output format for all selected files.
• Tools and codecs: DMSI will install all the different third party tools and codecs that it needs in order to perform all of its operations.
• Advanced options: you can add/enable AviSynth filters to tweak your video output (this is extremely easy to do, just go to the AviSynth tab in the settings and click to enable the filters/options you want and change each of their values).
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 0.7

Description: Media Converter SA is a free small program that can convert media files across many different formats. It also has a video downloading functionality from a number of video sharing sites such as YouTube, ifilm, Metacafe, and a handful of others.

It seems like a rare week that goes by these days without encountering yet another free video conversion software and, oh, perhaps 2 or 3 Youtube video downloading titles. And given that there are a number of comprehensive freeware media conversion titles out there such as MediaCoder and Super, I feel like I need to make a list of why I think this program is so interesting:

• Ease of use: Media Converter SA is one of the simplest video converters out there; there are only 4 settings that you have to decide on: video resolution, max file size, audio bitrate, and video bitrate (actually, there are 2 others: starting and ending positions, but this is an added functionality beyond the conversion process). Despite the simplicity, you get the sense that it provides all the control you need. Most of these settings have a “same as input” option which makes conversion really simple.
• Video downloading option: the sheer range of supported websites is enough to make this your video-downloading program of choice: blip.tv break.com dailymotion.com ifilm.com livevideo.com media.putfile.com metacafe.com myvideo.de video.google.com vidilife.com vids.myspace.com youtube.com zippyvideos.com 
• Online versions: the makers of this program provide both an online file converter and an online video downloader called Mediapirate.org. Read more »