Introduction
Powerful free Xbox360 video converter from Videora
Latest addition to Videora's range of free video-converter programs is the Xbox360 Converter. This is said to be able to convert a variety of video types into MPEG-2 files suitable for playing on Microsoft's new all-singing-and-dancing Xbox 360 console.
Xbox360 Converter - currently at beta version 0.81 and a 6.14MB download - joins two other free beta-version converter programs in Videora's range, iPod Converter 0.91 and Tivo Converter. A converter for Playstation Portable is also in development.
Videora's Xbox360
Converter program in actionThe Xbox program is easy to use and seems to be powerful, fast and flexible. It offers a decent range of presets to vary the final file size, data rate and picture size – and presets can be edited and saved under different names. Mind you, that's that's just as well, given that there are no PAL-size 720x576 presets supplied.
Initial setting up is
easy and fastThe program can encode at a constant bitrate (of the user's choosing) or three types of variable bitrate. It can also carry out encoding in one pass for speed, or two for better quality, and use the framerate of the original file or another that the user chooses. The audio bitrate and sample-rate can be varied and sound can be set to mono or stereo – with volume increased or decrease over a wide range.
It's easy to customise
profiles in a wide variety of ways and save them for later useWe found it very easy (and fast) to encode a variety of AVI and MPEG-2 clips using different presets (including some we quickly hand-rolled). We also had no problems using non-copy-protected DVD VOB files.
