Video converters are

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

s that can change the storage format of digital video. They may recompress the video to another format in a process called

transcoding Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target ...

, or may simply change the

container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Nota ...

without changing the video format. The disadvantages of transcoding are that there is quality loss when transcoding between

lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...

formats, and that the process is highly CPU-intensive. This article compares video converters that have their own articles on Wikipedia.

Overview

Input

Output

Features

Help and support

See also

References