Looking for an easy way to convert all your DVDs and video files on your Mac? Want to convert them to a different format so you can watch them on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV? A free program called MPEG Streamclip makes that process a simple one, and you don’t even need to own QuickTime Pro!
First, a word of explanation about that last sentence. QuickTime Pro is Apple’s upgrade to the standard QuickTime Player. With a QuickTime Pro license (which sells for roughly thirty dollars), Mac and Windows users can easily convert their videos to a ton of different formats, and with third-party codecs, to even more. MPEG Streamclip can do the same – and more – even without QuickTime Pro.
What all can it do?
Convert DVDs. You can take a regular, store-purchased DVD, and convert it to a format that takes up less room on your hard drive. This is fantastic for people with laptops who travel a lot. Using MPEG Streamclip, you can take the movie with you, without having to worry about the physical DVD.
Convert Video Files. With MPEG Streamclip, you can take any video that QuickTime can play, and convert it to something else. Do you watch a lot of Windows Media Video files on your Mac, via Flip4Mac’s Windows Media Video Player? Well, MPEG Streamclip can read those same videos. Now, unless you’ve purchased a license from Flip4Mac to be able to export videos, you won’t be able to save your videos as WMV files, but if you have… you can.
Download, Save and Convert Internet Video Streams. Do you have a favorite online video that you want to save to your hard drive and convert? Just enter in the URL and MPEG Streamclip will download it for you. Now you can treat it just like any other video on your hard drive.
MPEG Streamclip can also act as a lightweight movie editor. You can trip, crop and perform other light edits on your movie file, then either save or export.
As mentioned, MPEG Streamclip allows the user to export to many different file formats, including AVI, MPEG4, MOV and whatever else your codecs allow. And you can tweak the codec settings to your heart’s content.
You can change the final size of the exported picture, reduce the quality for portable device playback, or keep everything as high quality as you possibly can. If you do intend to use your converted video with an Apple product, MPEG Streamclip includes a nice selection of presets which it says are good starting points. Among these are the ability to immediately convert a video to iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, in a wide variety of pictures sizes, widescreen formats and even high definition. You can still, of course, further refine the settings, but the presets should be good for most people.
All in all, I’ve found MPEG Streamclip a wonderful product to use. It isn’t necessarily any faster than any other encoder out there (encoding speed is almost always a function of what codecs you use and the settings you choose), but MPEG Streamclip makes it easy to get a good-looking video, and in my mind that’s really what counts. If you’d like to try out MPEG Streamclip, head over to its home page and download your free copy.
