From the GOTD comments
#21: "The mobile converter installed OK, but I would warn you not to install the WinX YouTube downloader offered for free at the License code site, as it installs a SweetPacks Toolbar and makes Bing your default search engine, even when the box is unchecked during the YouTube installation.
These are very resilient unwanted insertions and take a lot of effort to get rid of them."
hmmm... didn't see Any of that when I monitored the install in my XP Mode VM. No needed registry entries [just garbage & uninstall keys], & files in 2 folders -- in fact I just copied the program folder from the VM to win7 & ran the app.
#23: "I’m not really sure why every Android device has to have it’s own profile in any software really.
All my devices will just play plain video in a host of formats without any need for customisation or need for conversion."
Great questions or perspectives, BTW...
Things aren't as bad as they were when the only handhelds to play video were MP3 players, but there are still some devices that can be picky about what they'll play. I think it's the nature of Android that different brands & models have somewhat different capabilities, & often different software from the factory, like players. They're different enough that the VLC mobile team hasn't officially released it for the US via Google's Play Store, as there are simply too many devices that the developers don't have, that they can't test VLC mobile on. So yeah, *to an extent* different profiles are necessary. OTOH if you take the same basic profile & label it separately for lots of devices you can advertise "Build with 200 profiles", in bold no less. :)
"All my devices will just play plain video in a host of formats without any need for customisation or need for conversion."
Long story short, it's possible to tweak the encoder settings to get video that'll look the best on your particular device, though you may [often will] have to use a converter or encoding app that lets you access more of those settings. I think many [most?] people don't want the extra bother, as Digiarty used to have much more settings available on their converters & have since dropped that in favor of simplicity & ease of use. As far as any need to convert or transcode the video, it depends on the source video you have, your device, & how much storage space you want each video to take up. Nice, high bit rate 1080p video may look great on your HDTV, but do you really want & need that on a small screen, & can you fit 40 GB? And if you're happy with DVD video instead, that doesn't mean your device will play the mpg2 the DVD uses straight out of the box, & since mpg2 is less efficient, DVD video will take up maybe 4-8 times the storage space of the comparable AVC version [even if that's not a *storage* problem, I'd Much rather transfer 1 or 2 GB rather than 6 or 8].
"It’s conversion rates are not that fast either, so don’t seem, from what I can see, support Nvidia or AMD video card processing and for the money I would expect to see that."
The search for faster video conversion can get terribly involved, with much riding on the hardware you're using, & where almost everything is a trade-off of one sort or another. Multicore CPUs can be a big plus, & things like Intel's Hyperthreading can make a huge difference, all depending on the software. Since you have to process a lot of data, writing the results to a file, your PC's/laptop's available bandwidth matters -- reading from one drive while writing to another can be Much faster, as can reading from an SSD, though writing to one not so much. GPUs [like the CPU, only for graphics] are better suited to some kinds of calculations than CPUs, but it's terribly hard to take good advantage of the GPU while still using everything your CPU has to offer, and making things more difficult still, Intel, Nvidia, & AMD all have different levels of support you can access depending on the model of chip, And, they each have their own separate capabilities, methods of programming, & features.
What that means to you is this...
How much your GPU *can* speed up video processing depends 1st on the make & model of your GPU along with the associated electronics -- if you don't have the most expensive graphics card it's generally a given that features have been deliberately disabled -- usually the cheaper the card, the more it cannot do. Depending on your graphics hardware, worrying about any GPU assisted video processing may well be senseless.
And when dealing with GPU assisted video processing, saying Your Mileage May Vary is the understatement of the year, if not the decade. Getting everything working can be a very delicate dance. If it works with whatever app to speed things up, *if* you still get the quality you're after, it's great -- just NEVER assume that will be the case, since you won't know until you try [there are plenty of reports of people with what seems identical hardware getting opposite results], & your results can & will vary depending on the type of source video as well as the target format. All you can do is try different software & even driver combos, though be careful to remove stuff that didn't work, or better yet restore a backup so changes are completely, 100% reversed.
When you're doing video conversions if GPU assist is involved, *Usually* software splits video processing between the CPU & GPU -- there are specialized apps that use the GPU much more, approaching entirely, & for some types of encoding they can be unbelievably fast [I've seen well over 600 fps], but quality of encoding, features, & ease of use are all less than you'll get with something like WinX Mobile Video Converter. Now how well video processing can be split between the CPU & GPU depends on the type of video processing -- some calculations are still faster with the CPU -- and in many [most?] cases which one is faster [GPU vs. CPU] depends entirely on your make/model of both chips & their chipsets. This can be further complicated by any other software getting involved, e.g. the encoder may not be able to use your GPU very well if it's already being used by software to decode the original or source video, or OTOH you may find the reverse is true, that some sort of GPU assist decoding the source is invaluable in speeding up the conversion.
There are basically 3 ways your graphics hardware can help out -- one is through DXVA [Direct X Video Acceleration] which often tends to be underrated; one is through the GPUs proprietary programming methods, Intel's Direct Sync [fastest but least complete], Nvidia's Cuda [most supported], & AMD/ATI's Stream [also called Avivo]; one is through OpenCL, which as the name implies is an open standard. If you have an Intel CPU you might also be able to use both your graphics card & a GPU built into the CPU. Finding out if any of that stuff comes into play is a bit iffy, but you can try using a temperature monitoring app like HWMonitor to see if your graphics card's temp increases, you can try to use something like GPU-Z or MSI's Afterburner to monitor GPU load [though it won't always show up], you can try to use Process Explorer to see if files associated with stuff like OpenCL are being used [though a file being open isn't proof it's being used], & of course you can & should use Task Mgr. to see what % of your CPU's in use, regardless whether or not the GPU's involved -- in my case the usual ffmpeg-based converters drop CPU use considerably with GPU assist on, only GPU assist doesn't work at all. :( It's your overall encoding time & quality that matters -- if you want to see if you can get GPU assist to speed things up with whatever app, you 1st need to know you've got it working.