Converting phone video to play on your PC

In the mobile learning world we seem to be forever converting media from one format to another. This is often because phone manufacturers are pushing the envelope in compressing media (especially video), but the PC players are a bit slow to keep up.

This is exactly the time to turn to the Open Source community, and today's post is to point out a few excellent sources of free media conversion.

To play back the file without converting it:
Use VLC media player to play just about any media file.

If you just want to convert the damn file:
Try http://media-convert.com who will convert just about any file to just about any other vaguely relevent format. So upload your phone-video, and get it returned as a wmf or mpeg that will play back nicely from your PC

Alternatively, download super which is ... well ... super at converting most files into most other file formats.

If you are a developer:
Our mediaBoard product needs to support just about any format of media from any phone, and convert it into a web-friendly format, and for this we use the excellent, open source FFmpeg component. If you need to convert your media files, they are well worth checking out.

Thanks to these sites, and the developers behind them for helping out countless of our m-learning users over the years!

G