Working with video and audio codecs can be a real pain, for the professionalmedia designer and for the home user who wants to playback old video they'vedownloaded from the Internet. For the professional media designer, if they'vebeen given video and audio to create a DVD, the media isn't always presented inthe format required to produce the DVD - the media needs to be decoded before itcan be encoded to the correct format.

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

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