Freeware Video Converter...

[Intuit]

Anyone tried this ?

http://www.nchsoftware.com/prism/index.html

Would've saved me a lot of trouble if I found this earlier... I am of course, assuming that it works.
It is from a professional level software company as opposed to Joe Blow the shareware-programmer  
so it should work as described, no surprises.  Let us know what you think.

[MrbLOB9000]

I've tried the software from these guys before, it seemed fine, it didn't work for me, but neither did anything else on that machine, so I think it was the windows install.  http://www.winavi.com/

[Intuit]

Installing and uninstalling CodeC packs and most especially installing multiple CodeC packs seems to ruin registry subsystem.
Speculating that installation programs don't want to overwrite files left behind if it's been determined that the old file has a
higher version number or "newer" turning the file system into a patchworked mess.  Since the files register differently if at
all no one particular CodeC pack works anymore.  The only possible fix is to revert to an older registry and restore all
the original files while deleting the additional ones.  For those reasons I always use an alternate throw-away installation when
playing around with large CodeC packs.  Convert it to AVI or whatever then it can be played anywhere.

[Intuit]

Hey that winavi is what I used awhile ago... though it was just in demo mode I think.
I found another freeware solution that didn't have a watermark... I'll dig it upa nd post
it later.  Its been awhile but I think the program might've been unstable and there was
a trick to getting it to work right.

[Connor]

Convert it to AVI or whatever then it can be played anywhere.

While I agree with you about Adding and Removing Codec packs, AVI is very Codec specific unless you run it Full Frames Uncompressed which for even short films can run to hundreds of megs and is impractical.

As a result when I'm producing videos these days I always use MPEGII as the output format. Most of my films are reduced by about a third in size.

The greatest Compression Vs Quality I've seen was MS Media 9 Codec. I converted all my movies to make them *very* small for an information box and it was in on an order of 10% of the avi file.

[hydran]

all i have to say is: you get what you pay for.

[Intuit]

Not necessarily Hydran... some freeware products are better than or equal to shareware products.

Conner, meant DIVX which is often distributed using the AVI file extension.  MPEG formats are also great for compatibillity as well.