Automen is a free software for computer that can perform video conversions across multiple formats and encoders. It supports XviD (for AVI encoding), FLV, X264 (MP4 for Ipod/PSP/PS3), WMV, MPEG4, MPEG2, and Huffyuv and is designed to be simple and straightforward for video converter.
This little free software has unexpectedly come out of nowhere to become one of my favorite video conversion program hands down. The primary reason for this is in it’s user interface: the design is simple and makes sense, yet delivers a high degree of control and advanced functionality. Here are the top 8 reasons why this program rocks:
- Normalize audio: for your audio track, whether as part of a video or when demuxing. Check the appropriate box in the “advanced settings” tab for this.
- Set output width, not output resolution: you can tell Automen, for example, that you want your output video to be 640 pixels in width and it will determine what the height should be based on the input video aspect ratio. This is a good thing, as one thing I do NOT understand in most video converters is their insistence on the user defining the full, fixed output video resolution (e.g. 630×480), which is totally needless and in many situations results in converted movies with aspect ratios that are out of whack. You will not have to worry about wrong aspect ratios with Automen. Its like free radio station
- Encode by desired file size, not bitrate: how many people know what bitrate is? Not many, yet many video conversion programs insist on asking the user for their desired video bitrate. Instead these programs can do what Automen does and ask the user for the desired video size in megs, something which everyone can understand (the larger the video the more bitrate it can give you and the higher the quality). If you must adjust the bitrate manually, however, you can do so in the “advanced settings” tab.
- Supports multithreaded processing: i.e. will take advantage of multiple core CPUs for faster conversion (check the box in the lower left corner of the ’basic settings’ tab to turn this on).
- Offers multiple encoding quality settings: aside from setting the output size, which will greatly influence the output quality, you can select from a number of encoding presets (e.g. single pass or two pass, slow or fast, etc). In this case the tradeoff is between quality on the one hand and how quickly you want the conversion to be completed on the other.
- Split output videos into multiple files: simply set the size in megs for each desired chunk to split into.
- Process only video, only audio, or both: simply check the appropriate box in the “advanced settings” tab. You can extract (demux) audio tracks from video files by checking the audio tab and unchecking the video tab.
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