SUPER – A Great Audio & Video Conversion Utility

Have you ever been caught in a situation where you need to have an audio or video file in a specific file? It could be one of those “just in case” things as you never know when you might need it.

Anyway, I was caught in a situation this week where the CIO wanted to show the CEO some of the videos that were put together for a recent event for the whole of IT. The video were already on a DVD as individual chapters but the problem was that most people at work don’t have the necessary codecs (enCOder / DECoder software) installed to play a DVD natively.

What is a friendly geek to do?

SUPER (Main Screen)

Enter a little utility called SUPER. It might look a little busy but this nifty application can transcode audio and video files of many formats and even join audio or video files of the same format. There’s also the ability to “mux” together video and audio into one file or “demux” a video into separate audio and video files.

The options presented may be somewhat daunting but for basic conversions you choose your output container in the top left (which will be wrapper holding the video and/or audio)  as well as the video and audio formats to go inside the container. You also have the ability to muck around with the video resolution, frame rate, bit rates and other bits and pieces but you might want to check out the specifications of your source file first so you don’t end up overly degrading the output.

With the help of SUPER, I was able to convert that DVD into three separate videos (in MP2 format for those who are interested) which seemed to do the trick. The learning curve might be a little steep for newcomers but it certainly is the best conversion utility I have used over the years.

Incidentally, I managed to do this on my home computer whilst at work as our computers do not allow users to install software. I actually had to transfer the DVD files to my Windows Home Server over the Internet, login to the home router and use “Wake-on-LAN” (or WOL) to wakeup my desktop computer and then use LogMeIn to remotely connect to kick off the conversions. I then copied the files back to work over the Internet which didn’t take too long given the good compression.