Sorry, I forgot to mention that I am running Win7 Home Premium, Svc Pack 1.
Thanks again for any help.

Michelle,

At the bottom of the program main interface the output folder to be used is displayed. At the end of that line is a symbol (icon) for a folder. Click the folder icon, and you will get a dialog to browse to the folder you want to use as the output folder.

Gal,
Thank you for the advice.
Unfortunately, that was the first thing I tried and will not work
While this will change the output destination on demand, it does not change the location of the registered config.ini file.
Manually moving the config file and associated folders (w/its registration code) simply causes them to be rebuilt, w/out the registration key (or 'activation code') w/in "My Documents" upon opening the program.

Iow, upon opening the program, by default it searches "My Documents" for the registration and, if not there, the file is automatically rebuilt unregistered, asking me to register.

Would be nice if someone from WonderFox Support Team advised.
However, I do sincerely appreciate your attempt, Gal.

The system requirements say that this software will work with Windows XP but it doesn't. By the way, I happen to like Windows XP and I will continue to use it as long at it meets my needs.

brosmith, For Windows XP, the best browser to use is Firefox, and antivirus is the free version of Avast.

brosmith, same here! I think they forgot to test it in that OS. :(

Ivanovich, Still, it is one thing to disagree with someone posting on here, but it is not social etiquette to demean someone by calling the stupid, or idiot, or any other derogatory term in an open forum such as this. We can agree to disagree, but let's not let the GAOTD comments devolve into name calling. That only turns people off and makes them not want to offer their contribution no matter how good or trivial it may be. In other words, let's all be nice and possibly we may learn something that we might never have thought of.

Paul, may I point out that many visitors have stopped, just because they are always predominantly one-year trials that are offered. Also outdated programs in a new jacket, or nowadays programs that are no longer useful in Windows 7 to 10. It has also been said that rental programs are offered. When it comes to paying a (usable) program, many visitors drop out. Do you really think that GOTD only offers useless programs? Sharewareonsale and giveaway-club offer the same programs and then I forget a few. Then there are still visitors who are wailing because their virus scanner is sputtering. Windows has Defender, if something is suspicious, Defender will stop it. If GOTD says that what they give away is virus-free, that's true.
A useless program from Windows: Movie Maker is abolished.
Something else; If you want to change the world, start with yourself.

Paul, my comment was in reference to the person who was ridiculing me for using Windows XP. The other person's comment was removed and so it made it look like I was talking about someone else.

Mario, 2 hs and 47 minutes B&W film with 640x480......That is normal, converting usually lasts as long as the movie takes.
With HEVC - H265 the size of the film file is much smaller than the original and that is a fact.
The Video Converter from Digiarty also uses the H265 video Codec.

WT,
I got the same errors (XP SP3).
Their website states "Compatible with Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP/...", which is also repeated above on this page.
Come on Wonderfox, don't let us XP users down now.

WT,

For people that purchased lifetime licenses for their XP OS, Wonderfox effectively guaranteed those users a lifetime of use. It would be against the purchase agreement to not make it work for XP.

Carolyn ,

It could be that your firewall is also getting in the way.

consuella, Thank you, I'll temporarily disable my firewall & try again :)

consuella, nope, turning off the firewall along with avg didn't make any difference. Thanks anyway :(

Not that it is an answer or really any help but I sort of ran in to the same thing. I got the activation message before anything else happened even though I disabled all my security. I thought it had failed but about 30-40 seconds later the program stated unpacking, then it installed fine and is working. No idea why it happened, never ran into it before. Maybe try again and just wait a minute or so (no help I know)?

Carolyn ,
Don't know whether it will work for you, but what I have to do is turn off firewall and AV, then restart the PC (without them turning on again!). Then install the program and register it and only then turn AV and firewall back on again

Carolyn , I would reluctantly suggest rebooting into safe mode with network support and installing it in that environment and then rebooting back to normal windows afterwards and then performing a antimalware scan to be as safe as possible, as yesterdays or a week agoes scan for malware does not preclude an unknown threat passing GAOTD previous scans but being publically detectable today or tommorow even!

Ootje, thank you for your post. If you could please write a few words of conclusion/verdict, it would be appreciated.

Yanco, "a few words of conclusion/verdict"
Bad luck, I don't have the experience to do that.
Verdict are very dificult. One likes red, the other like green.
Sometimes I wrote, that I have difficulties with reading some tekst, light grey letters on a dark background.
Most of the time I will only give links to the results. And then a person can see it.
Sometime ago a Karl wrote a verdict. And also someone who gave his 2-cent's Bad luck they stopped.

NickSteel,

Not a chance. The software likely duplicates pixels (no other way to do it, really) to fill a bigger bucket of bits, but aside from a larger file size, it's more likely the opposite will happen - the original images will be somewhat degraded from the procedure.

You can try it simply for yourself - take a decent looking smaller jpg still image, and use some program to make it 2.5-3 times its original size. Does it look 'upgraded'? Pretty unlikely. Now imagine that degradation applied to images in motion.

DD,

You're absolutely correct, but there's also more quality loss that's unavoidable when you re-encode video. If, based on your example, you enlarged a jpg image, saved it as .jpg, opened that file, enlarged & saved it & so on, the amount of data lost in the process of encoding, creating the jpg file would soon become apparent.

This kind of quality loss can be [Much] more visible when you're working with video. Plus different encoders & settings can interpret & save color information differently, & that conversion loses quality. And while video can be saved [encoded] in a jpg-like format, with each frame including a complete image, it's extremely unlikely you'll ever encounter it at large frame sizes [HD & greater], since that can mean files that take up hundreds & hundreds of GB. Instead, video is encoded with complete image frames spaced throughout the video, with only the changes from one complete frame to the next recorded in the majority of frames. So to re-encode that video, each frame has to be re-generated, then new key frames & intermediaries created as the video's re-compressed.

It can work if you start out with more data than you need, so the data you lose is less or equal to the data you'd discard anyway going from say 2k or 4k to 1080p, & that's how the edited, finished video you see on a Blu-ray for example came about. Going in the other direction, putting smaller video on a larger display, your best option is to let hardware do it, e.g. DVD video shown full-screen on a 1080p display, or 1080p on a 4k panel.

NickSteel, All that can POTENTIALLY be done is upscale using an asthetically more pleasing algorithim than hardware upscaling in a video playback device like a DVD player or SmartTV media player. Rest is just a waste of space to upscale a video with a LOSSY codec like x265 or x264 or VP9 no matter what else you do to enhance the upscaling you then LOSE quality, maybe chroma spatial resolution or chroma depth resolution.

NickSteel,

More is possible than most know about.

Using the example of enlarging a photo, it is easy to be convinced that any attempt at enlarging an image will end up being somewhat dismal, as we know that the software had to create new pixels to fill in the extra space, however not all software works in this manner. Most packages are doing what Photoshop does, so what could be better than what they do? There are some alternatives that do not use the standard bicubic enlargement methods like Photoshop and others do. A company by the name of Alien Skin makes a product called Blow Up that works a lot differently than the most common options we see, and it is available as a Photoshop plugin. The comparisons of both methods on Alien Skin's website is impressive.

Another product called Perfect Resize uses fractals to analyze an image in order to produce an improved enlargement. These same methods could eventually be built into video conversion software such as Wonderfox HD Video Converter Factory Pro, and others that we commonly see here on GOTD.

In the meantime, it seems logical that any attempts to upgrade SD video to HD video should result in noticeable and distracting artifacts simply because they too are using the standard bicubic algorithms, however TV manufacturers have been improving SD for around 10 years at least, and with noticeable improvements.

The first time I encountered this was around 10 years ago when a salesperson was attempting to convince an elderly gentleman that his SD movies would look better on the HD TV he was considering. The salesman explained how the TV looked at surrounding pixels, and mixed these pixels to fill in the new space. Being familiar with the common methods of enlarging images, I did everything next to some degrading insulting to the salesman, and attempted to convince the customer that he was being taken advantage of due to his lack of technical expertise. In spite of my attempts, he bought the TV anyway. When he got home, we set it up next to his older TV. The first thing I wanted to prove to him that the same SD DVD would not look better on the new TV. To my surprise it looked nearly HD. It was very impressive. That is something you will need to experience for yourself.

So, it if is possible to see noticeable improvements in the TVs, why not the software such as Wonderfox HD Video Converter Factory Pro? I have seen some improvements, but it is nearly random. It depends on the quality of the original source SD video. You cannot get great improvements with fuzzy SD, but decent SD can look letter after being converted to HD. To me, it isn't enough to get really excited about until we get the Alien Skin Blue-Up capabilities in video. .. and that will happen sooner or later.

jj juice , ....files and limited space on your HDD....For that you have to use the H 265 Video Codec to convert. Then the size of a movie file becomes a factor between two and three smaller. The quality remains the same as with H264. An example: a film with a size of 26,777,210 kB (H264) would then only have a size of ± 9,000,000 KB with H265 video codec.

jj juice , err mkv files are just media container files the compression type and level of the codecs used to compress the media contained in the mkv files is NOT dependant upon the container being a mkv file and could just as easily be an AVI or ASF/WMV or MP4 or MOV or WEBM container file. You can put a highly compressed HEVC/AAC movie in an AVI file or in a MKV file and a compitent media player will play them both just as well as each other and both will be very similar file sizes.

Kjell, it is likely to be privacy options or features or difference in scripting behavious of the underlying scripting engines or privacy choices.

Kjell, The problem seems to be with chrome, which belongs to google who have just messed up my email for no reason.
Avoid google where there is an alternative.

Tim, when you say "you still then are given no choice but to first install onto your computer Giveawayofthedays "Software Installer"" what are you calling their "Software Installer"?

If you mean the softdeluxe signed setup.exe program that is not an installer but an installer protection wrapper in conjunction with the setup.gcd file that contains the encrypted final installer. The purpose of which is to protect custom installers that have some giveaway specific customisation that allow the activation of the giveaway license and therefore need to be restrained from being freely usable on days other than the authorised giveaway day.

Sometimes the setup.exe/gcd protection system is used when the contributors installer is NOT customised in any way and their normal installer is included, those times are just smoke and mirrors where the vendor may be pretending it's a custom installer to prevent the giveway license being used in perpituity with their freely downloadable installer on any day. Which of course just causes trouble for many end users having to jump through hoops of disabling AV programs and re-booting in and out of safe mode with network support.... until someone like me points out users can just download the installer from the vendors website when applicable.

update: downloaded from their website and installed no problem