Media Coder

Site: MediaCoder HQ

Purpose: Transcoding

Country: USA? (author Stanley Huang)

Price. Donationware (or as some ppl call it, Nagware)

OpenSource: No

Transcoding is used when you have a video and/or audio in a format, and you want to convert it to another format. Reasons can be, because it's unplayable on your favorite device, or it takes too much space on disk, or you can just change it's resolution, etc.

Media coder does it, and more, for multiple files at once. Actually it's a GUI wrapper for encoders like FFMPEG, Mencoder.

I've used tencoder for years, and it does just fine, but it uses only versions of the encoders that are CPU based. I own a GTX 10*0 card, so I know it can transcode video using the GPU, which is much faster. It might be possible to recompile my encoders and even tencoder (it's opensource) to use GPU, but I found it faster to simply use a GUI wrapper that already does it. And that's MediaCoder.

I've been converting all my H.264 F1 videos (12GB each race) to H.265, decreasing quality to 25%, and it's amazing how good H.265 is, in its Nvidia flavour, encoded by NVENC, one of the encoders present in MediaCoder.

Of course, there are a bunch of them, CUDA encoder, the old FFMPEG, x264, x265, Intel Encoder, etc. You can also transcode audio, change the container (mp4, mkv, etc), and even more advanced stuff. There are parameters for everything, and you can save them as presets.

All in all, a very good application, and free to use.

There's only one problem. It's not freeware. It's what ppl call nagware. For multiple files, you get two annoyances. The first is that the videolist is limited to 50. It's actually a big number. That's not a problem, as long as the batch processing was fine. But that's the other problem, every now and then, depending on time/size of files/whatever, the program stops and asks you for a donation or for you to go Premium. It stops the batch processing until you answer the question. I looked for the pricing, and for GPU encoding, you cannot go with the Premium Basic, you have to go with Premium Plus, and that's 127€. That's a lot of money for mere transcode batch GUI wrapping, in what my usage is concerned.

I'd be happy to donate, but unfortunately, I don't understand how donating works, it seems that you need to donate some USD until it unblocks the app..., supposedly, for a limited time. That, I don't like.

I don't want to crack it or use a hack, it makes me feel bad, as I was owner of Adware applications in the past, and I know how it feels when someone cracks or worse, when someone publishes the crack. 
That's unethical, and I had to threat a portuguese bastard that tried to that to me, with violence.

But there are more ethical ways. I decided to script my way around the "nag" question that asks you to sum or subtract numbers every now and then, and automate it. But then I found out a few ppl that had done it, or wanted to, but somehow it didn't work for them. 

I recoded some parts and it did work for me. I'd show a bit of the coding here, for AutoIt. But I won't show it, being considerate with the author. Actually, I'd like to ask the author to get the question to be more complext, so that people don't code that easily around his request for donation.