How many times have you come across a movie or a video clip and wished that you could put it on your iPod and watch it on the go ? Or came across a DivX encoded video and wished that you could burn it to a DVD and play it on an old style DVD player ?

With the increasingly fast broadband connections that most of us have these days, videos are becoming as much a part of our daily internet consumption as text is. But, unlike text, videos are not portable – You can’t just take a video from one source and play it anywhere you want. Of course, with media players like VLC, this is less of a problem but even VLC can’t help you if you want videos from a random site to work on, say, your iPod.

If converting videos and juggling between the different file formats is becoming too much for you to handle, you should give WinFF a try.

WinFF is an open source GUI for the excellent command line video convertor, ffmpeg. It combines an easy to use graphical interface with the feature set of ffmpeg to produce a one stop solution for all your video conversion needs.

WinFF is available for both Windows and Linux.

To get started with converting videos to your preferred format, download one of the pre-build installers for your preferred operating system and follow the usual installation procedure.

The first step to converting videos is to launch WinFF and click on the Add button to add a video to the queue.

If you have more than one files to convert, you can add all of them to the queue and WinFF will convert all them one by one. Very helpful when you have a full folder of videos to go through.

The next step is to select the output format for the converted files. WinFF does a very good job of categorizing and hiding the complexity behind all the different types of media that ffmpeg can work with.

From the Convert To dropdown, select the type of video that you want to convert to. This will select the codec that the video will be encoded with. For an iPod, I chose the iPod+iTunes option.

WinFF then lets you select a device preset which lets you further fine-tune the output videos.

Choose, the one that suits your taste, select an Output Folder and you’re ready to hit Convert.

The actual conversion can take some and so, if you ask me, this would be the right time to go get a mug of coffee (or a bottle of beer) for yourself.

Have you ever struggled with video conversion before ? Which software did you guys use to convert your videos then ? Let me know in the comments.