We're in Love With This Video Converter
In this digital age, you could hardly find a person who has never used a video converter. And, with so many people trying their hand at using technologies, there are a lot of video converters created out there.
But when it comes to using them for the needs of your business, it‘s not always “what you see is what you get.”
You start to try one after another and find out that, sadly, most of those video converters are buggy. Probably everyone can relate to the feeling when, in the middle of processing your video, it gets stuck without any obvious reason. And it just won‘t go any further, whatever you do.
When they are not buggy, they are difficult to use and inefficient. You have to open multiple windows and press buttons on multiple websites to finally get the result you desire. It takes a lot of time and gets on your nerves.
And if the video converter is working perfectly and is easy to use, it costs money.
But let us tell you a secret. There actually is a converter that will make you fall in love with it immediately – just as it has made us do.
Meet the Miro Video converter. It may sound like a fairy tale, but this one is completely free, works flawlessly, and is one of the best tools to use to convert older video formats to MP4. Just try it out and you will see. Also, we have no relationship with the folks who have created and are not getting paid to do this post.
We have brought it a little further, though. The way we use Miro is a little different from just working with old videos. We use it to compress videos used in for streaming in membership sites that we have built for our clients. This saves us time, money and produces great quality videos that don’t stall.
Because, you know, usually, when you have a membership site where users pay to have access to, you don’t want to embed your videos from YouTube, even if they’re unlisted. Not only it looks less professional, but it also reduces the value of your content and exposes your videos to potential theft, or misuse of your content.
That is exactly why, to avoid uploading videos to YouTube and then embedding them into a membership site, we use another excellent service called Sprout Video.
However, anyone who works in this field knows that videos shot with a DSLR camera or any other professional equipment tend to be large (3, 4, 5 GB, depending on length). If you have hours and hours of original content, this adds up to hundreds of gigabytes.
Not only it takes longer to upload such large videos to Sprout, but it also forces you to keep buying more and more expensive plans to keep up with your storage needs.
Also, even though Sprout does an excellent job compressing and serving larger videos to the members of your site, sometimes larger videos do bugger a little.
And this is where the amazing Miro Video Converter comes in.
Before uploading a video to Sprout – even it’s in MP4 format – we run it through the converter as if we’re converting it to MP4. The converter does its magic: it reduces video size by making it more streaming-friendly and saves us money on Sprout fees.
Moreover, these "lighter" videos also provide a better viewing experience for the members of our clients’ member sites.
Case and point: the original file was 1.73 GB. After we ran it through the converter, the size was reduced to only 161 MB.
It only took us a few minutes to get it uploaded to Sprout. Then, we would grab the embed code from Sprout and use it to embed the video to our client’s membership site.
The result is lighter, great quality videos that your membership site users can stream without a glitch.
Ever done this trick? Just try your hand at it and you‘ll be surprised at the excellent way it works.
