Recently I had to transcode a batch of music from one format to another. A friend of mine recommended MediaCoder, a free media conversion utility for Windows XP and up.

At first boot the interface looks daunting, but newer versions have apparently made the transcoding process much easier. When MediaCoder starts, it opens a web form in Internet Explorer which guides you through a set up wizard. This wizard asks simple questions regarding what you would like to convert and how you would like to convert it. When you’re done, the application itself pops up behind IE and goes to work. Users who would rather dive right in to the application are free to do so without having to go through the wizard. MediaCoder supports such audio formats as MP3, Vorbis, AAC, FLAC, WMA, and RealAudio. It supports video in H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG, Theora, WMV, and virtually anything else you can think of. It gives you full control over how you format your media. Among the options you can change are the target bitrate, the number of audio channels, and whether you would like your video to be cropped. There are also predefined templates available for certain devices. For example, if you want to convert a video to an iPod-compatible .mp4, you open up an iPod template, set the desired quality level, and watch MediaCoder go to work. It will resize and re-encode the videos automatically, so all you have to do is move them to your device. All in all, it’s a very cool utility for transcoding anything from an mp3 file to a full length 1080p movie.