Rick Martin
That is the most contrived review that I have ever read. It is totally clear that you have no affiliation with the bigasoft company. Other than getting paid to write reviews. What a joke

Hardin Thicke
I you only knew Mr. Hardin Thicke! LOL No I'm just a retired guy that's been i this PC - BS since 1983. I spent my carreer in HighTech Industry as it pertains to Remote Control and Monitoring Hightech Industrial Complexes via Networks and the Internet.

Currently here we host 300 customers and provide graphics design and tech support. My wife has just about completed her Masters.

Now maybe I was just lucky on our business class connection. And possibly I was able to figure it out quicker than some others. The actual time it took including activation was 10 minutes!

In view of all the money we spend keeping our customers secure and online I would be more than happy to work for Bigasoft because from what I got for nothing obviously works much better than many of the other offings here.

As for you I'm sorry that you are having obvious problems and might consider a little diferent approach and possibly a few lessons on social etiquete as well. You might even quit your day job!

Have a great day and if Bigasoft wants to pay me GOTD can pass them my email!

Have a great day!

Rick Martin

Mom's Basement
Try to install the trial; just for check if your Windows is ok with this kind of software.

Ootje

OK - Did what you asked.
Got the trial version from Bigasoft website.
It installed just fine. But is a Trial.
The GoTD version runs the softwareinformer,
the activation box and show web browser "what next".
But the Bigasoft installer never starts with the GoTD version. Just dies there. Maybe something with the .GCD file not liking my Window computer. I tries on Win7 and also a Win8.1 computer - failed both places.

Can Bigasoft help?

harold
temporarily disable AVG and then run the *.exe file as administrator

Kondoril

Did not work for me. Did not have AVG installed and did try running as Administrator (right click, run as admin). Must be something else. Or a quirk in the installer.

Mom's Basement
Then disable the antivirus that you have..

brenda
To view your videos in full screen just double-click in the centre of the video in your video viewer, it certainly works in VLC.
In this program under the preview window click the lower rightmost button to go to full screen.
Trying to convert to full-screen will probably result in huge files with no gain in quality.

brenda
Try selecting an option to keep the aspect ration the same. That might work for you.

Question... Why does asking a question merit a thumbs down vote? Would it bother you so much to take a minute to help someone?

brenda
The player determines the size of the player's window, the same way you can set any window's size or make it full-screen. For the converter end of things you set the desired output frame size, be it 320 x 240, 720 x 480, 1920 x 1080 etc.

gpc111
Well said!
Marking someone down for asking a question is not in the spirit of the site.
I've had lots of help here from people who were willing and kind enough to answer my questions.
Let's keep it that way.

XP-Man To be in accordance with GAOTD's spirit, the essence of this site is to "share experiences" with a specific software presented that specific day. Note that I'm emphasizing share experiences therefore this site is not meant to assist or help people in need. You know better than me that for that purpose there are literally dozens of sites out there. On the other hand, questions asking for assistance are wasting reader's time and contaminate the spirit of this site.
I'm still missing guys like Ashraf, Karl, Giovanni, Funken and others that were giving an intellectual spin to this site every single day with valuable, objective, well-balanced assessment of software offered every day. Developers were very grateful with such opinions.
Oh, well, "the good, if brief, is twice as good", I guess.

Dawa You said, can it convert mkv files to avi? According to website yes, If this is faster and will convert mkv files I'm excited. It seems possible as per their website.
Please check full details using url link.
http://www.bigasoft.com/total-video-converter.html

Dawa
"... can it convert mkv files to avi? This is my greatest headache - converting mkv to avi that will play on my four year old sony tv."

Avi like MKV doesn't really mean anything other than it's a video &/or audio file. What you need to know is the format of the audio & video that are inside the avi files that work for you - check out MediaInfo [videohelp.com] -- & then set the output in a converter like Bigasoft Total Video Converter to match.

paul
With any encoder &/or converter you'll likely have to try it out while using something like the free GPU-Z to see if your Nvidia graphics hardware is active [similar to using Task Mgr. to see the CPU % used]. Next, if it is, do a comparison of the results with & without. Graphics hardware acceleration most always reduces quality a bit, so you need to decide if it's worth it when available. Beyond that it gets complicated...

Nvidia has been scaling back CUDA support in favor of NVENC. Previously they scaled back Open CL support in favor of CUDA. What your graphics hardware is capable of then depends not just on the hardware -- how new it is, plus more expensive Nvidia graphics hardware does more in this respect -- but on the driver version you use. Converters use the ffmpeg code libraries, which can support CUDA, NVENC, & OCL, depending on how the code is compiled.

That said, ffmpeg includes the x264 & x265 encoders. X264 is mostly CPU bound -- it can use OCL for the look ahead portion but the effects on speed are minimal. The x265 roadmap lists OCL, but it's unclear whether it's been included yet or not. That means that if & when ffmpeg [or the app you're using] uses hardware acceleration, it's more likely for steps other than encoding, e.g. video still has to be decoded & optionally re-sized before it's re-encoded. Software [like a converter] may also use NVENC rather than ffmpeg to encode H264/H265 when supported hardware is found & hardware acceleration is turned on.

Although none of my video players would play partial conversions the program itself will play them, a pleasing feature in my book.

XP-Man
"the advanced has many choices quite a number of which I am unfamiliar."

I'm not sure why, but documentation for the x264 & x265 encoder settings has become harder to find, with some sites going dark, & others not being updated. Nonetheless you can probably get a good idea of what the settings do by reading some of hits you get Googling on something like x-264 settings -- ffmpeg also has a page that might help -- trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264

"Often I stop conversion early and examine the partial file to get an idea of the quality of the conversion but unfortunately none of my players could play them, again a disappointment."

If you make a short clip out of a longer video, or download & use a movie trailer, those usually work well for testing. A DVD or Blu-Ray copy app, or DVD Shrink if you've got a DVD copied to your hard drive, should let you copy just a short chapter. Depending on the type of video you have, you can usually find a few apps at videohelp.com that will trim video to get a short clip without re-encoding -- if you re-encode, you're checking the converter on the re-encode rather than the original you want to convert.

mike
My motive is to test the quality of the converted video; because of my old eyes I tend to like a higher contrast and an increase in apparent sharpness, viewing a partial output gives me an idea as to the suitability of the conversion.

XP-Man
"My motive is to test the quality of the converted video"

What I like to do, FWIW, is save a few short video clips just for testing. That way it's like having a ruler of sorts to measure all video apps like converters & players with.

"because of my old eyes I tend to like a higher contrast and an increase in apparent sharpness"

I'd suspect that any filters or FX to increase sharpness *might* also lead to artifacts that would make it appear less sharp to you. Higher contrast should be doable, & besides any contrast setting in a converter itself, one way might be to decrease the color range. Analog TVs had a smaller range of colors between black & white than PCs [& HDTVs] are capable of. Your graphics driver might include this setting [AMD/ATI drivers do], & some video software has it too. My thinking is that it would force for example a near black to be black, & the same with every other color, which might make objects seem more well defined. If you were interested in pursuing that aspect even further maybe look at the documentation for AviSynth, & maybe try that in combo with something like simple x264 launcher.

Another thing you could experiment with are the x-264 profiles [for animation, film etc.]. Also, depending on how bad your eyes are, & how much time & $ you were willing to spend, you can work with your monitor profile & settings. I use a Spyder5Pro -- using the software that came with it, or dispcalGUI, I can create a monitor profile that has an awful lot more contrast than any factory or Windows default. [You can buy used color calibration hardware, like earlier Spyder models/versions, on ebay cheap. They may not be as accurate as they age, but should work for this.]

Lillo
I think I'll be downloading handbrake, but does it offer video trimming/cropping/etc or just the conversions?

And is there a similar one for audio files?

Lillo

Yeah. I have use it to, but I not get it work, coz I not get any subtitles even that I have choice to use the Swedish as are in my .ts file and the subtitles are in DVB format from a satelit reciver, but freemaker shows the choicen* subtitle... But my newest computer gets bluescreen and I can not see what it are as wnt wrong, and that are with all programs as far as I shall convert to a HD Format, it can be a SD File and the bluscreen comes anyway... And are same with todays software.... But that are fast to conversion that are now 49% after 1h and 34min and the file 0are in .ts and the zies are 7.8GB and last time I convert a movie it took about 10+ hour, and that are fast compared to other programs I have tested.... But I unfurtly I belive it not will get any subtitles.... :(

PCMan
DVB captioning is usually embedded in the file, & thus has to be stripped out to work with it using ccextractor. A DVD VOB file or Blu-Ray .m2ts file combines audio, video, & subtitle tracks -- some apps will work with them as-is, while others are useful after you separate the individual tracks using a demuxer.

Once you have the captioning or subtitle tracks or files, they can be in a text format [e.g. from DVB] or in a graphics format [DVD/Blu-Ray]. If you have graphics format subs there are apps to OCR them to text.

Graphics subs can be included in DVD, Blu-Ray, & MKV files, though not all players will display them. Text based sub files can be placed in the same folder as the video file, & when named the same as the video file, many players will display them. A 3rd option that's offered by some converters is to take the text file & make the displayed subtitles a permanent part of the video -- they basically display the subs on top of the video & capture the result, encoding it.

Lillo
Thanks Lillo, I will also be downloading and installing this one. Looks like a good one too.

Lillo
"I used a lot of video conversion programs and I can say that the best is this: "

Some like Handbrake, some don't, & many find it harder to use because of the many options that not everyone wants or needs. Regardless, if you use the x-264 or x-265 encoder with the same settings or presets, it shouldn't matter whether you use x-264/x-265 from the command line, from within Handbrake, or using today's GOTD from Bigasoft -- the results should be the same.

Lillo
I was using Handbrake then switched to XMedia Recode which I found better. It also does audio conversions and strips audio out of video files so you can save it as a separate file.

mike

Really thanks for your answer, that explain so I know why it not works... But do you have any advice on demuxer, where can I get them and wich ones are best? I really love to do things like this... :)

And if I can help sometime I will do that, with happynies... :)

I agree with you, but I think its a little expensive, when there are free ones for nothing...But the advantage is that it is fast when it comes to conversion... compared to other converters I have tried both free and payed ones... :)