Freemake Video Converter, Audio Converter, Video Downloader

Ever since the Tour de France ended, I’ve been looking for some video tools to help me splice some of the videos back together. Live broadcasts don’t always go according to plan and you end up with fragments of the race. What I need to do is join them back together. Seems like a simple process, but apparently my way of thinking about video isn’t the same as everyone else. I look at it the same as editing audio. You open the file, it appears on a timeline and you remove the pieces you don’t want and add the pieces you do. You save the file as a new completed piece and everything is done.

Well, not quite. While I’ve had many misadventures with video editing so far, I did want to share a very neat set of tools that I came across that allow you to convert video files between a slew of formats, a video download tool, an audio converter and a YouTube to MP3 converter. And all of this comes at the cost of Free.

The Freemake Video Converter reminds me of Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate in that it can take any source material and convert it into anything else. AVI becomes MP4. MPG becomes MKV. FLV becomes WMV. You literally drag a file onto the converter and select the output source and that’s it. A few minutes later the file will be done. You can resize the video, change the bitrate, fiddle with the audio codec and even trim the video clips. That is pretty impressive. And, you don’t have to run around looking for 3rd party codecs. Everything you need is built in. That is a personal frustration of mine.

Freemake Video Converter also comes with a lot of presets for mobile devices including Apple, Samsung, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia. You can also format your video for YouTube as well as extract the audio tracks to MP3. You can even go all crazy and make SWF or FLV files for a website and Freemake will give you the code you need to make them play correctly on the page.

You can also select multiple videos and join them all together as one long file. Once you load all the files you can drag them around, change their order and even have a fade transition between "scenes". This would make it easy to put a compilation video together.

That unto itself is a great tool to give away, but Freemake has a couple of others. They have an audio converter which works the same way as their Video Converter. Just drag your files, select the output format and away you go. You can even join multiple files together for one long track. That would be good for your running or cycling workout.

And finally there is the Video Downloader. Like a lot of other tools, this hooks into the actual hosting system and lets you download the video to your machine. You can either copy and paste the link into the app or you can use the Browser Button it installs. It worked like a charm on some YouTube videos, but the authors claim – "YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Veoh, Dailymotion and 10,000+ sites." That’s a pretty big statement.

But, if you combine all this, it’s basically the same thing as the Xilisoft Media Toolkit Bundle which retails for about $100 (if you get it on sale). The Freemake bundle is shockingly close and is Free. They really don’t charge anything. I’ve already combined several videos and extracted some tracks. There is no watermarking, or Ads or messing with the files in any way. The installer will try to download some 3rd party apps to offset the costs, but you can easily uncheck those. They aren’t trying to be sneaky in any way. I already have the Xilisoft Media Toolkit, but I felt compelled to donate money to Freemake for the awesome work they’ve done on this suite of tools.

The downloads are small and the tools run very quickly. It might not be the video editing toolset I was originally looking for, but it’s a keeper. I ended up installing all their apps so I won’t be caught unaware in case I have to edit something. I download music and files all the time and I can definitely see me using these in the future. If you work with video, download videos or download music, I think you need to check this out.

Freemake Video Converter, Audio Converter and other tools

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