Current Events > Do they not make good free video converters for Windows anymore?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've been using this program, Handbrake, for over 10 years. At the time it was okay but now it is slooooow as shit.

My wife's friend wants to upload videos from her camera but it takes fucking FOREVER. I think it will take more than 20 hours to do them all.

I've tried looking for other options but EVERYTHING these days is a trial version that leaves big ugly watermarks, stops working after one conversion, or will only convert 1/3 of the video or some such shenanigans. It used to be that I could at least look at review sites to know stuff like that but even those sites can't be trusted anymore. I had one listing the "best free converters that don't leave watermarks" but the number one option, movavideo converter had a message telling me to pay money to take away the watermarks and then I got an error and couldn't even see what it looked like.

These are MTS files totalling more than 15 GB so I can't use online conversion sites. I just want to convert them to a more manageable size without paying $50 for it. Anybody have a good free option that they're using?

I don't know what a MTS file is but avidemux supports converting to and from any format that you can give it a codec for.

Tbh for MTS Handbrake is probably your best option. You can use DaVinci Resolve but I'm not sure how well it handles MTS files. It didn't use to at all but I think they've updated it since like v12 to handle them.

MTS is a high res video format that a lot of digital camcorders use.

What I don't understand is, why is handbrake so slow? I used one of the commercial conversion software options (freemake video converter) that let me do it once and then was like "if you want to convert any more money then pay us money!" and it took about 15 minutes to do a 1 GB file, with perfectly fine results.

Meanwhile the same size file in handbrake is taking more than 2 hours! I just picked the "fast 720p30" option. Do I need to tweak it or something?

A total shot in the dark, but check and see if there's a .cfg or some kind of properties file in the install directory. Sometimes smaller, older software projects will have configurable memory profiles to make sure they don't lock up someone's computer entirely (by sucking up all the available RAM) and (if it does) you can usually just put in a larger number and it'll use more resources to run faster.