While folks at Wondershare have named their app A video converter, I think its name hides some great features that it has. Sure, it is good at converting videos, but the app also has some other great features that are definitely worth your attention.
The Wondershre Video Converter is a PC and Mac supported video converter that costs $60 at the time of writing. We will discuss if it’s worth your money or not in our review.
Installation, Configuration, and First Impressions
Installation is pretty straight forward, grab the free to download installer, run the file and then you are good to go. Installation did not take much time, although the speed of installation will depend on your internet speed. The App has a reasonable footprint on the storage (almost 200MB) and the installer did not try to install any adware or bloatware on PC which is always great.
Once the installation is done, all you have to do is open the app and register using your license key and then you will be good to go.
From here, I did not need to download and install any additional codecs, you may want to change the output folder for converted files though, which I always prefer to be same as the input folder.
UI And navigation
Wondersahre Video converter’s UI is divided into 4 tabs, which are for converting, burning, downloading and media streaming respectively. Below the tabs, you can find two panes, the large one is devoted to listing the files that are to be processed and the narrow one is for changing settings for outputs.
Wondershare Video Converter is an x86 legacy app, so it will probably won’t work with new Windows 10 S, but on Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro, startup time and UI response both were quick.
Convert
The first tab is labeled “Convert” and here, all the media conversion is done. To convert a file, simply drag it to the main area and then from the Right side pane, pick the conversion format, choose the output format and output quality, once you are done, just hit the big Convert button on the bottom Right corner and you will be good to go.
I was impressed with the editing tools and output formats, once you have added a media file, you can trim the video, add filters, crop the frame and even embed subtitles to the file before exporting it. Apart from having a ton of output formats (it includes support for VR videos and 3D videos too), it has presets for common smartphones and tablets which came in handy for converting media for my trips where I wanted to see some ripped movies on my phone.
There are a lot of output formats to choose from and they are arranged well.
You can also add watermarks on Videos, but I didn’t use that feature much.
Burn
The second tab is about burning media files to blank writable DVDs. In past, Microsoft included a DVD maker with Windows but starting from Windows 8, the company has removed the utility, if you need to burn and watch DVDs, the features of Wondershare Video converter should be more than enough.
Burning DVDs on Wondershare Video Converter
It supports both DVD5 and DVD9 and you can record the output on an ISO file of you need to, The process of burning a disk is fairly straightforward and similar to converting files. The app has 11 templates for creating menus (if you need to create one) and if you want you can customize the menu by adding your own pictures, music, and titles.
Download
Wondershare Video Converter’s third tab is dedicated to features around downloading videos from websites, while it is not as full featured as KeepVid Pro or YouTube By Click, for most users, it should cover all their needs.
Available video formats when downloading from a supported website
All you need is to copy the URL of Video from any supported website (YouTube is supported and so are most other major ones) then click on the Add URL button and then pick the resolution and format of the video. The download speed will obviously depend on your bandwidth, and then having conversion options to other formats makes it quite convenient to just grab some videos, converting them and then syncing them to your device for traveling.
It also supports recording videos straight from your desktop if a website is not supported.
Media Server
Wondershare Video Converter also has in-home streaming very similar to Plax, you can scan your media library and then stream it to any of your network-connected TV, that supports DLNA/UPnP.
Media Server
The app mentioned that it works with Xbox, Apple TV, PS3, Roku and Chromecast among other devices, but I did not use the Media Server features, so I can comment on its performance.
Performance and Usability
I installed and tested the Video Converter on two devices, the first one was a Skylake i3 Laptop paired with 4 GB or RAM and Intel HD Graphics, the second device was a Skylake Quad Core i7 6700HQ Laptop paired with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and Nvidia Geforce 960M Graphics card with 4GB of frame buffer.
The app worked well on both PCs, conversion on the first device was more time-consuming compared to the core i7 PC (which is to be expected considering the difference in core count and clock speed, but the time taken for Downloading and burning on both devices was almost same. Here is a screen shot of CPU utilization when I was converting a 720pMKV video to 720p MP4:
Usability wise, the app worked fine and during my a couple weeks of testing, I did not witness any crash or bugs that are worth mentioning. Understanding the UI and navigating around it was easy too, though I think it can be improved.
Conclusion
As a DVD burning or Video Downloading application alone, Wondershare’s utility would not be able to justify the price but considering it is primarily a video conversion application, Wondershare Video Converter is worth the price because it is easy to use and it performs well.
The idea of downloading some media off the internet, converting it to the desired format and then burning or streaming to directly is impressive and Wondershare Video Converter achieves it without any added complexity.
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