How to use conversion tools

You may be a media creator who wants to offer her videos in a variety of formats and quality settings. Or you may be a user who can't open a video in an exotic format. Sooner or later, you'll want to make use of conversion tools for video or audio.

Video

VLC: xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx

QuickTime Pro: The free version of QuickTime plays .mov files on a PC or Mac. Stepping up to the $29 QuickTime Pro version unleashes some serious capabilities, such as converting videos to formats suc as MPEG-4 and H.264 for the iPod. It also provides better compression for iPhoto slide shows.

Audio

The free program Max creates high-quality audio files in various formats from CDs or files. It supports more than 20 audio formats, including MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, AIFF, WAV, AAC, Apple Lossless and Monkey's Audio. Max allows you to batch-covert audio files, to rip audio CDs and rip tracks as a single track without gaps.

Also free, Austria's Switch lets you convert Microsoft's unprotected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files with the help of the free Flip4Mac plug-in.

Graphics

If you're stuck when trying to open a graphics file, GraphicConverter from Lemke Software ($30) can open nearly 200 kinds of graphics file formats. It can also export to about 80 file formats.

Sources: Ourmedia; Macworld

up