I've been writing about the use of Any Video Converter to convert video from one format to another -- notably, from Flip .MP4 to Windows Media Video (.WMV). For reasons I'll get to, the video I'm working on will use another converter that comes directly from the mothership -- Microsoft Expression Encoder.

One good reason to use such a program, and the one that I have focused on, is if you happen to be running a version of Windows or using a version of Windows Movie Maker that doesn't like Flip's native .MP4 files.  Whether or not you're able to edit those files in WMM can change from one day to the next, depending on what you have installed on your machine.

Last week I discovered that Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 suddenly stopped accepting .MP4 files.  It used to work, and now it doesn't.  I entered a support request, and got this amazing response:

Dear Mr Icenogle,

Thank you very much for your e-mail.

Can you try to change the .MP4 file extension to .MOV and make sure that you have the latest version of Apple Quicktime installed.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for any further questions.

Kind regards,
Robby
Corel Customer Support

This was my first solution to getting Flip files to play nice with Movie Maker, when they were being balky.  Again, sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't.

At any rate, there are other reasons to use a format converter. You might, for example, want to use a video format converter to be able to edit video from different camcorders in any editor that doesn't accept all the formats you want to include.  You might want change the format of a video to be able to successfully upload it to a video sharing service.

I happen to have, in addition to a number of Flips, a Canon HF10.  It shoots AVCHD files, with either a .MTS or M2TS extension, depending on how you harvest them from the SD chip.  I found that Any Video Converter did a less-than-satisfactory job of converting these files to .WMV.

If you live on Windows, it may be a good idea to accept the reality that .WMV video files are the easiest to live with, and if you make that leap, it appears that Microsoft Expression Encoder, while not quite as intuitive as Any Video Converter, does the best job of converting nearly any kind of video to .WMV.  Watch for the video...