Any Video Converter Lite for Mac

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 08, 2012

Converting videos to allow them to be shown on an iMac, iPhone, or iPad can be a tricky process if you don't know what to do. Dual-OS users already know the frustration of converting videos supported by Windows (such as WMV or AVI) into the MacOS environment. Any Video Converter Lite is a free product that can perform conversions several ways, readying your video clips for the supported formats of an iDevice.

Any Video Converter Lite installs on an iMac or MacBook Pro quickly and easily. The entire process took just a few seconds. Once installed, converting video files is a matter of adding files to the library (which displays file information such as name, duration, video and audio format, resolution, and frames-per-second rate), specifying an output location, and letting the utility do its job. The interface is easy to use and requires no expertise other than the ability to navigate directory structures. You can convert a single file, or assemble multiple files into a batch and convert them all with a single click. Converting can take a bit of time, so batching multiple video files lets you walk away without a lot of intervention. Conversion of all common video and audio formats is supported, and changes can be made to some parameters (such as video size and bit rates) during conversion. Beyond the standard video and audio formats supported by iDevices, Any Video Converter Lite also supports video formats for the Microsoft Zune and most smartphones.

Any Video Converter Lite also supports a few neat features such as splitting larger files into smaller ones, merging smaller files into a larger one, as well as some basic editing capabilities (clipping and cropping) that give you control over the clips you want to produce. In our testing, we were pleased with the features built in to Any Video Converter Lite, especially when it came to slicing and dicing WMV and AVI files from a Windows device for our iPad and iPhone. Although it may not have all of the features found in expensive conversion programs, Any Video Converter Lite can be used by nearly anyone and it's free.