Working with video and audio codecs can be a real pain, for the professional media designer and for the home user who wants to playback old video they’ve downloaded from the Internet. For the professional media designer, if they’ve been given video and audio to create a DVD, the media isn’t always presented in the format required to produce the DVD – the media needs to be decoded before it can be encoded to the correct format.

There are plenty of open-source codecs available. For instance the K-Lite Codec Pack collates a number of old and new codecs within one package which you can use to encode/decode and play your media. However, some of these codecs require you to use multiple media encoders/decoders and who wants to install these packages on one computer?

MediaCoder is a tool that collates the use of these codecs in to one interface. From the single interface, you can import your audio and video, quickly see the codecs used to encode them and then convert them to another format, where required. MediaCoder goes much further than simple conversion though. You can take DVD-quality video and then reduce this to a format that will be playable on a portable media device.