This is the 2nd in series of Giveaways in Avinashtech Birthday Celebrations i.e. ABC-2. This review is done by our Forum Mod Ashwin who blogs at Ashwingeek.

Developers Description

iSkysoft Video Converter is an excellent Video Converter software which can convert all popular video files from one format to another on Windows with great output quality and high conversion speed. It lets you easily convert between all sorts of video files such as AVI to MPEG, WMV to MPEG, WMV to MP4, XviD, H.264, MKV, etc. which can be played on almost all popular portable players. Besides, this Video Converter software offers you series video editing functions including crop, trim, set the brightness, saturation, etc

Version reviewed: iSkysoft Video Converter for Windowsv3.0.2

System Requirements: Window 7/NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista with 1G Hz CPU or above.

Test PC Specs : E2220 Dual Core 2.4GHz with 2gigs RAM running Windows XP Home OEM SP 3

iSkysoft Video Converter’s GUI looks simple yet good.There are three icons on the upper left hand corner of the interface, to:

  • Add, Clip and Edit the selected videos
  • You can click on Preferences to see the different options for conversion:
  • There are a lot of output formats to choose from, click on profile and select the desired format manually.

From Common video, common audio, online video, and Video formats supported by devices like Apple, HTC, Nokia etc.  You can tweak the output settings more with options like:

  • Video encoding (H264 or XVid)
  • Video resolution (size in pixels)
  • Video frame rate
  • Video bit rate
  • Audio encoding (AAC AC-3, mp3)
  • Sample rate
  • Channel
  • Audio bit rate
  • and even Split the video into 2 or more parts

Remember,if you want to convert a video and want the file size of the output to be smaller than the source video, you have to reduce the output resolution, bit rate, etc.You can also edit subtitles for the videos if you have any.

I tested this by converting a video with a subtitle file (.src)  and the output video contained a hardcoded subtitle. I converted a 436mb avi file, (a documentary film) to Mkv format.Used manual output settings as shown in the screenshot:

Conversion process was slow. took around 57 minutes, and the output file was a 295 mb .Mkv file. The video quality was excellent.

The time taken for the conversion process to finish, the conversion speed, the output size,etc depends on the size of the source video. The larger the source video , the longer it takes to be converted

If you are converting a large file, I suggest you leave it overnight to finish.

Clipping videos:

1. You can let the video play and pause it at the desired location to mark the Starting and end points and cut the video

or

2. You can use the marker to move to the time stamp and mark it, and cut the videos

or

3. You can manually jump to the time of your choice by entering the time in hh:mm:ss (H=hour, m=min,sec) format.

Editing videos:

You can crop videos, add effects (Gray,emboss,Negative, old film), Add watermark (text or image), adjust the transparency of the watermark,etc and even add subtitles to the videos.

I found their help pages to be quite informative. Have a look

GIVEAWAY :

I have Thirty (30) Licenses of  iSkysoft Video Converter to giveaway . The rules are simple. For being eligible to participate in contest/draw, you need to do the following:

  1. Subscribe to Avinashtech by entering your email address in the subscribe box on right sidebar of the blog or by clicking this link.. Do remember to verify your email address when you get the verification email from Feedburner.
  2. After that, just leave your name and email address in the form by clicking this link.

A Small note:

Each Forum member’s name will entered THRICE in the Draw and Each Non-Forum member’s name will be entered TWICE in the Draw.

On the forum, we already got a thread discussing about iSkysoft Video Converter and giveaway. Have a look at it.

The draw will take place if more guys are interested than the number of licenses. The giveaway is opened for next 72 hours.

http://www.avinashtech.net/giveaway-reviews/1196.htm