Recommend a good video converter app for Mac?

[mwhite]

Anyone have a good recommendation for converting video file types? I'm talking converting WMV, FLV, AVI, WEBM to MP4. I've used Aimersoft in the past, with good results, but haven't used it in a long time and maybe there's something much better?

Thanks in advance.

 

[sublunar]

Anyone have a good recommendation for converting video file types? I'm talking converting WMV, FLV, AVI, WEBM to MP4. I've used Aimersoft in the past, with good results, but haven't used it in a long time and maybe there's something much better?

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried Handbrake? Seems like an obvious one

 

[QuarterSwede]

I use Handbrake but ran across this site (and app) which will do conversions for a huge amount of file types. It uses ImageMagick, FFMPEG, and Pandoc for some backend dependencies.

 

[mwhite]

Have you tried Handbrake? Seems like an obvious one

Thanks for the suggestion. If it were that obvious to me, I wouldn’t have asked (or needed to ask)!

 

[benholt]

Handbrake will get you most of the way there, but a heads-up: older WMV/VC-1 files can choke it because that decoder support has been spotty on Apple Silicon builds. When that happens, ffmpeg via the command line is usually a one-liner — `brew install ffmpeg` then `ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac output.mp4`. Takes 30 seconds to learn and it'll chew through a whole folder if you wrap it in a tiny loop.

If you want a GUI over ffmpeg without the command line, Permute is pretty solid, drag-and-drop, and handles all four of the formats you listed. Not free but reasonable.

 

[mwhite]

Handbrake will get you most of the way there, but a heads-up: older WMV/VC-1 files can choke it because that decoder support has been spotty on Apple Silicon builds. When that happens, ffmpeg via the command line is usually a one-liner — `brew install ffmpeg` then `ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac output.mp4`. Takes 30 seconds to learn and it'll chew through a whole folder if you wrap it in a tiny loop.

If you want a GUI over ffmpeg without the command line, Permute is pretty solid, drag-and-drop, and handles all four of the formats you listed. Not free but reasonable.

Thanks, I did end up downloading Handbrake, and so far, it’s worked great.

 

[mwhite]

Have you tried Handbrake? Seems like an obvious one

I did download it. Thanks.

 

[MacGizmo]

The one thing most of these video converters don't seem to be able to do is embed or set a "Thumbnail/Poster Frame" into your video. The only workaround I've found is uploading to Youtube, setting the thumbnail, then re-downloading the video using (any one of the numerous) video downloaders. Apps like Subler claim to do it, but in my experience it only works about 50% of the time.

I should add that I have Adobe's Creative Suite, which includes Premiere, Premiere Rush, After Effects and Media Converter – but while I'm an expert in print and digital graphics, I'm dumb as sh#t when it comes to video, so maybe this problem is easily solved. I found it to be a superbe test of my patience and sanity trying to figure it out, though.