Video converters

I didn’t realize how much music my 80 GB Zune can hold until after loading my entire music collection and found it only uses 7 GB. Upon this pleasant discovery I decided to load some videos. Videos, however, are taking me a little more work. Nothing earth-shattering, it’s just that the videos I’d like to load are not wmv or mpeg-4. This set me up on a quest for a free video converter. After trying several different programs I settled on one called “Prism” that I downloaded from CNET.

Prism can convert mkv, avi, mov, ogm (and more) to wmv or mp4 video formats. The interface is easy to understand and so far the conversion has been satisfactory – though understandably it depends a lot on the quality of the source file. One caveat. Some of my videos originally with a 4:3 aspect ratio are slightly squished horizontally after conversion to mp4. I don't expect perfection on such a tiny little screen so it doesn't bother me much. I've also noticed that in a couple of my videos the voices are too quiet relative to the music / sound-effect volumes. I don't know if tweaking Prism options would alleviate this -- frankly I can't be bothered.

Anywhoo, I don't know if there are better free and unrestricted video converters out there - so unless one jumps into my lap for now I'm sticking with Prism since it does what I want it to do.