Ok, I apologize for the length of this review, but when I bought this software I was in a real need for a simple, cheap, and reliable video converter, but there was almost no real helpful information given about this and several other software programs on amazon – but let me tell you, this program really delivered. I was very nervous buying it after reading the single review posted, which said that it didn’t work at all; however I am glad I made the investment and encourage any who need to quickly convert video and audio files to consider this program. The length of this review is to hopefully give others more information than I had when I took the gamble on buying it. So feel free to ignore some of the details if you wish – it won’t bother me at all .

This product is a very simple but effective program. I was looking for a way to transfer video from my DVD’s to my computer and ipod, and this program really delivered. In combination with the free online download DVD Decrypter, I was able to remove the copy protection from my DVD’s with the decrypter, and then convert the .VOB format into .MPEG4 using this video converter. (For more info on DVD Decrypter, wikipedia has a page dedicated to the program.)

This is a great tool to use for converting from one video format to another; for converting from one audio format to another; and I was pleasantly surprised to find that you can even convert from one video format to an audio format. This third option was great because I have a DVD of Johnny Cash’s Chapter and Verse, which I wanted to have on my ipod to listen to in the car, and believe it or not, this program converted the video taken by DVD Decrypter and gave me just the pure audio format! I love it!

As for converting formats into HD movies, I haven’t explored those options just yet but I am certain it works just as well as the regular formats. The product description isn’t kidding when it says it has a lot of formats to convert between. Though I don’t consider myself an expert with computers and audio/video formats, all of the ones I recognize are in the drop down menu choice such as, WMA, WAV, MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC; MPEG 1,2, and MPEG4, MOV, FLV, MKV, AVI, etc…

The installation is pretty straight forward, requiring administrator privileges to install completely (tried under a limited account first time but it couldn’t access the necessary files and so it didn’t work). The download time was only a few minutes on my standard Comcast cable connection. As for installation time, it only took a couple of minutes as well and didn’t require a reboot of my computer, (I hate having to do that).

Coming to System Requirements, for those who are interested or would like to compare to their own, I have a Dell Studio 1555 laptop with Microsoft Windows XP service pack 3 installed, with INTEL Core 2 Duo CPU – T9550 @ 2.66 GHz. Also I have 3 GB of RAM. I ordered these improvements with my laptop and believe that the program works very fast because of it. When I monitor my CPU activity from Task Manager during the conversion, it takes about 70-100% of one core processor and about 10-50% of the other, leaving me free to do other tasks on the computer as it works. However, I am unsure how well the program functions on other computers with slower CPU’s and limited RAM. Also, storage room is another requirement that should be considered with video, since an average file size for DVD’s I have put on my computer is around 5 GB.

Some other features to mention that are nice about the program is the ability to set it so that it will convert the video/audio files on queue and then either hibernate or shutdown when its complete. This allows me to place several movies on my computer before I go to bed, and then start the Movavi converter and go to sleep. Also, when you add a file to the converter queue, (a note on that – the program doesn’t recognize .VOB files when you click the add file buttion, so in the drop down box at the bottom where it says “All Formats”, you have to choose “All Files” in order for the movie to show up if you are using DVD Decrypter) a nice feature of the program is that you can view the selected file in the video box to the right of the queue screen – which is great for either watching the movie through, or making sure you have the right file selected. The layout is pretty simple, and the nice thing about this program is that there are no advertisements around, unlike the free online video converters. There are several other aspects of the program which seem nice, like simple editing tasks, splitting video files, adding watermarks, etc… however since I have not used them, I will not comment on them here.

Overall, I really appreciate that the company that made this program separated it from the entire video suite. I’d hate to have to pay 60 dollars for the entire suite and only use this part of it. The $30 price…

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