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The best video format converter freewares

HanaDaddy 7 Comments

I have been searching for some good free video format converters for a while. I have actually installed and tried in my desktop PC. The results were astonishing! Some of them do work better than the commercial ones.

Most of them are based on the FFmpeg LGPL software and other open source utilities. FFmpeg is a great piece of software, but it contains only console commands and does not come with any fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Basically these freewares that I will initroduce act as a the front GUI for FFmpeg. So FFmpeg is not for a casual innocent PC user.

I tried several freewares. Some are worthless to mention and some are very nice. There are the three finalists.

MediaCoder


This is probaly the most powerful video format converter with the every options that you will ever need.
You can drag and drop the source files just like Any Video Converter. And you can play around with the option contol in the lower pane. Note that it shows nice little summery of the output file format and expected size if you click on the ‘Summery’ tab. When you’re done with changing the options, you click on the ‘Start’ Button to execute the conversion. The output file will be created in the same folder where the original source file is located by default.

Here is the description from the website.

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

And Here are the supported formats ( * supported as input only)

MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

When I tried to convert wmv to avi, it did work fine. But when I tried wmv to flv conversion. ffmpeg.exe has crashed and MediaCoder did not respond properly so I had to close it.

  • Interface: 7 of 10
  • Easy to use: 5 of 10
  • Available functions/options: 10 of 10
  • Stability: 6 of 10
  • To Flv conversion: Didn’t work
  • Final Verdict: It’s OK if you want to control all the details of the output video.

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[Yahoo Widget] HANA-WP-STAT

HanaDaddy 2 Comments

hana-wp-stat yahoo widget

Here is the Yahoo widget that I created . It’s my first Yahoo! Widget and it is for WordPress Blog Stats Monitoring.

Features
Basically it shows below six information of your WordPress blog.

  1. Total number of spams caught by Akismet
  2. Number of spams in moderation
  3. Number of comments in moderation
  4. Number of posts
  5. Number of comments
  6. Number of categories

Optionally number of unique hits for today and yesterday only if wp-shorstat or wp-slimstat plugin is installed.

The below image is the About menu of the Widget.

About Box

Requirements

  • You do have Yahoo! Widget installed , right?
  • You must have a WordPress Blog.
  • You need to install and enable HANA-XML-STAT plugin that I created
  • You need to enable Akismet Spam Blocker plugin. In fact, you don’t have to enable it , but then you won’t be able to see the related statistics.
  • Optionally, you might want to install wp-shortstat or wp-slimstat for hit counter.

History
10/22/2007 – v0.4
Some bugs with XMLDOM routines so errors occur when there is no child node exists (No values)
v0.3
DockIcon Function Added for Yahoo! Widget Version 4. Akismet, Comment in moderation, Hit counts are displayed.
v0.2
Initial Release.

Download HANA-WP-STAT Widget v0.4

Install & Setup

  1. Download and double click the ‘hana-wp-stat.widget’ to open the widget. You will see the popup window to set the wordpress URL in the preferences menu.
  2. Open preference menu and provide the URL of your wordpress. Please make sure that you need to set the correct wordpress URL. The prefix ‘http://’ is needed, too.
  3. WordPress Userid & Password are required only if (1) you want to use the ‘Recheck comments for SPAM’ menu or (2) if you set ‘hana-xml-stat’ wp plugin option for only signed in user to access the data.
  4. By using Update Interval Slider , you can set the time period that the widget will acesss the statistics data. The default is 1 min, and the maximum value is 60 mins which is an hour.

Preferences Menu

Some Notes

When there are some comments in moderation, you will be able to use ‘Recheck comments for Spam’ menu. ( Or little red ‘X’ icon ) What it really does is to check the comments with Akismet again.

It is found that there is a time that some spams fall into the comments moderation section when the Akismet plugin timeouts connecting to Akismet spam server. It usaully happens when the network is slow and busy.

So by just checking again, you can make sure that there is no spam lurking in your comments moderation box.

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