It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another edition of Free Mac Software Sundays. Today, we’re going to introduce you to ffmpegX.

Essentially, ffmpegX is a video conversion program designed to convert video from pretty much any format to pretty much any other format.

It’s very simple to operate and almost as simple to install. When you first open ffmpegX, it’s going to inform you that you need to manually install various video codecs in order for the program to work, but fear not. It provides you with a set of links to the necessary codecs so you don’t have to go searching for them on your own. The program does this because it is illegal to include the codecs, and, since the program is free and is incredibly useful, there’s really no room for complaining.

To start, drag the file you want to convert into the program. Choose the target format, and, if you’d like, make any tweaks to the format through the various available options. Then, just click the encode button.

Converting videos doesn’t take too long provided you have a decent enough set-up, and many conversions should occur faster than the actual length in time of the video. A 12 minute 640×480 .mp4 file took about 6 minutes to convert to Xvid on my 2GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 2 GB of RAM.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to figure out a way to do multiple files at the same time.

This program could very well be (very close to) a video downloader’s dream. You can find out more or download ffmpegX here.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 3:54 am under Mac, Tips.  Print This Post

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