Movavi Video Converter for Mac Review

Media file conversion, transforming one file type into another, isn’t something everyone needed to do until recently. Now we have vloggers and bloggers and podcasters making up a much bigger slice of the population, so in the 21st Century, everyone and his mother are media producers.

If you make videos, then there’s a chance you are gathering material from a variety of sources: phones, cameras, the Web, friends, etc. In all likelihood, these files will be different formats, encoders, frame rates and bitrates. That’s not to mention all the additional text formats and audio formats which have to be dealt with in the course of your productions. If you’re not a total tech expert this can eat a lot of time unless you have clever tools. We look at one of those tools, Movavi Video Converter, in this review.

This is a sponsored article and was made possible by Movavi. The actual contents and opinions are the sole views of the author who maintains editorial independence even when a post is sponsored.

Conversion Station

Movavi Video Converter is an all-in-one tool to convert almost every media format into something you can use. Using this tool, you can reliably get from “over here” to “over there” and make old media playable on new computers and vice versa.

In a simple-to-use interface, you can input and output over 94 video formats, around 45 audio formats and 55 image formats, and even 21 subtitle formats. I overuse the term Swiss Army Knife, I know I do, but this is one utility which richly deserves that slightly amusing nickname.

The clean and simple interface that allows you to perform these feats of technical wizardry employs an easy drag-and-drop style and makes your file conversions painless and fast. Something which sets Movavi apart from many other conversion utilities is the quality of its conversions. This is apparent right away to anyone who spends any time hacking videos together.

Reliable and Flexible

The name Movavi betrays its roots as an old school video utility, being as it is the combination of the first two formats it converted, MOV and AVI. I don’t know if that’s true, but in any case, it’s come a long way since then. Indeed, we reviewed another iteration of Movavi a while back. In my experience using it in my work, this new upgraded and updated version holds up.

I know it’s boring to fill reviews with lists of supported formats, but in this case I must, so I’ll keep it brief. Video formats like ASF, AVCHD, AVI, DIVX, DVD (MPEG), FLV, MKV, MOV, OGG, SWF, WebM and WMV are all convertible and catered to. That’s not a complete list, but those are the main formats that will be important to most people. Will you use all them? Not all the time, but on that single occasion where it’s important, I think you’ll be grateful that RMVB, VOB and 3GP made the cut. There’s a full list here of all the old and new formats served, if you’re interested.

The list of supported file formats is impressive, because not only does it process all the modern formats you’d expect, but it also covers a lot of rare, arcane and obsolete formats, which can be difficult to deal with if you have nothing to play them on. As well as all these useful old and new video formats, you have a range of audio formats (AAC, MP3, FLAC etc.), a baffling range of image formats and even subtitle formats which can also be converted.

There are some terrific new smart features, too, whereby you can connect a tablet or phone, and the software will detect the best kind of video for it.

You can stabilize shaky footage, adjust bitrates, color and crop, rotate and trim and even add watermarks. Another really cool feature I love is the SuperSpeed mode. Instead of laboriously converting files which are superficially similar, say a change in bitrate, instead of doing a full conversion, it just re-multiplexes it and makes the new file without conversion. That’s pretty neat.

And in addition to converting different subtitle formats, as an added bonus, if you don’t have the subtitles for any given film, you can also search for subtitles for it online, right in the app.

Not only is all this good for pro and part-time video producers, it’s good for everyone. Everyday use cases crop up all the time. If you need an elderly relative to see an MP4 video you’ve made, and they can only watch old Windows Media Videos on their creaky old PC or Quicktime on an old Mac. You have it covered. Or how about if you discover you have a lot of old but precious family videos on an old drive or computer, and they are in MPEG or WMV formats? There are a ton of deeply personal reasons why a video converter enhances life with sharing and communication.

I like how Movavi looks and how it works and that it’s utilitarian without being boring and good looking without being simplistic. It’s an essential tool for serious video production, home de-archiving and sharing. It even supports hardware acceleration so that it not only does all these cool things, it does them fast.

Where can I get it?

Movavi Video Converter is so much more than just a video converter – it’s more of a media conversion workstation. It’s not a toy but more of a tool. Pricing of the product does reflect that status, with the annual cost being $39.95 for a one-year subscription, or if you don’t want to go for that, you can short circuit the whole deal and pay $49.95 one off for a lifetime license.

Considering how many times a week I would use video conversions, for me that’s good value for the money. If after reading this review, you don’t want to commit right up front, don’t despair, as there is also a free online version of the software you can use to try out the quality of the product. Full details are on the Movavi Video Converter website.