Video conversion program?

Is there a good, free video conversion program out there that won't leave a watermark on the finished product. I guess I'm looking for shareware primarily, unless somebody could help me find an alternate route I'm trying to convert an .mkv extension video on my computer to .avi.

Thanks for any help, guys -

Kegan

[wayner123]

imtoo is the best I have found.

[OLS]

Look for quickmedia converter on tucows. Not sure if it leaves a watermark,
not sure what that is in video terms. But it is freeware, so I guess you could
check it out for yourself. I have been using it for a year and have had no probs.

[rack04]

Originally Posted by kzm007

Is there a good, free video conversion program out there that won't leave a watermark on the finished product. I guess I'm looking for shareware primarily, unless somebody could help me find an alternate route I'm trying to convert an .mkv extension video on my computer to .avi.

Thanks for any help, guys -

Kegan

mkv and avi are containers. What is the video and audio formats stored within the mkv? The reason I ask is because each container has its own limitations. For example, h.264 in avi is a no go.

Originally Posted by wayner123

imtoo is the best I have found.

Originally Posted by OLS

Look for quickmedia converter on tucows. Not sure if it leaves a watermark,
not sure what that is in video terms. But it is freeware, so I guess you could
check it out for yourself. I have been using it for a year and have had no probs.

I'll check those two out, thank you. I've heard of IMToo, so I hope it works. And a watermark is essentially like a logo on a TV channel, only to make you prefer paid versions of programs, they stick giant, distracting see-through watermarks across the video once it's converted.

Hold a new bill up to the light. In the lower right corner on the front, you'll see an image of the president; that's a watermark.

Originally Posted by rack04

mkv and avi are containers. What is the video and audio formats stored within the mkv? The reason I ask is because each container has its own limitations. For example, h.264 in avi is a no go.

I'm not too sure what you mean, but the mkv is an AAC to the best of my knowledge; it's an iPod format. I want it in AVI so I can eventually burn it to ISO for DVDs.

[Totemic]

Originally Posted by kzm007

I'm not too sure what you mean, but the mkv is an AAC to the best of my knowledge; it's an iPod format. I want it in AVI so I can eventually burn it to ISO for DVDs.

MKV (Mastoska) is a file format. You can store any type of video or audio stream in it. Similar with AVI. It's merely a file format.

Think of it this way, let's say you save a picture in a word document. The file format for that picture saved is DOC file (or DOCX if you're using Word 2007 or later). However, what is the picture format? Is it JPEG, Bitmap, TIFF, GIF, etc..?

So what rack04 is asking is what kind of video format is in those files. You say AAC, AAC is actually an audio format, not video. But since it's from an iPod, it's most likely a form of H.264 (aka MPEG4--which is kind of misleading, it should be really called MPEG4 Part 10 or AVC).

You say you want to burn it onto a DVD, does that mean you want to play it in a DVD player? If so, you have to transcode that to MPEG2 or MPEG1 streams. DVD players can only deal with MPEG2/1 video formats.

But this is largely irrelevant since you're talking about removing water marking. This isn't so much conversion as editing. Unfortunately, I don't know of any easy way to remove water marking (which is probably why they use water marking in the first place--it is a form of copyright protection) without:

1. Taking each frame (both I and P/B) and converting it into a full I frame (such as motion JPEG).
2. Editing out the water marking on EACH frame.
3. Re-encoding it to MPEG2 to be used on a DVD.

The last step is usually not too difficult since any half decent DVD authoring tool can handle frame based video and convert it to MPEG2 streams contained in VOB files.

The first step is also not too hard, since you have to convert the video stream to some frame based format to view it anyways.

Where it goes splat is step 2. That's an AWFULLY time consuming process. Imagine a 60 min video clip, assuming the standard film frame rate of 24fps. That's 86400 frames you would need to hand edit out the water marks from. This of course assumes you have gobs and gobs of disk space to hold all those frames (even with some massive JPEG compression, you should expect a 50x to 100x increase in disk space going from H.264 for motion JPEG if you want to maintain any semblence of fidelity).

What you're asking for is not a trivial task.

[Eleven]

I use Any Video Converter. The basic version is free. Its all I have used for a long time now. Converts basically anything to anything.

[Totemic]

Originally Posted by Eleven

I use Any Video Converter. The basic version is free. Its all I have used for a long time now. Converts basically anything to anything.

For transcoding audio/video, Any Video Converter is a very good program. Simple and for most purposes, perfect.

Although it gets totally wonky when you get into the really high bit rate stuff--I think there's a bug in it where if you attempt to convert anything to WMV9 (VC-1) at greater than 10Mbps, it simply truncates the bit rate (so if you put in 18Mbps, instead of 18Mbps, you end up with 1.8Mbps--1.8Mbps for a 1080p video doesn't look very good). Not sure if it's a bug or just some weird limitation that recently cropped up (I used to use an older version that handles >10Mbps VC-1 without problems).