Conclusion

You've got a hard drive full of videos in many different formats, old and new. You want to play or stream them on your Treo with Kinoma Player 4 EX. Some of them are just too "fat" or too old – Kinoma Producer 4 is what you want. This tiny, elegant, inexpensive Windows or Mac program takes your video (or audio, or many other file formats), and converts their pixel dimensions, frame rate, bit rate, and scads of other parameters in ONE pass, in real-time OR FASTER, (depending on settings).. and writes them back out so they'll play beautifully on your Treo or MANY other hand-held devices without spending a fortune, or needing a degree in rocket science.

If Kinoma Player 4 EX knows how to play it, Producer 4 can convert it to a suitable file type and size so easily, it's scary. There's some learning curve here, and some experimentation for optimal results is necessary, but Producer was designed with the "I just want to convert my files, not pilot the space shuttle" consumer in mind. For that, use its pull-down presets. For those who like to experiment, or twiddle with settings, use its tabbed windows. For those who want to batch process a wad of files and know how to write command like scripts, it'll handle that too.

Support from Kinoma is, as always, as good as it gets.

Criteria  Rating Cost/Benefit 5 Usability 5 Features 4 Design 5 Overall (not an average)

Pros EASILY scale / convert a wide range of video and other media files to modern formats for smooth, portable playback and / or streaming Beautiful, logical GUI with pre-sets for ease, tabbed settings for advanced tweaking, and command-line scripting for pros Convert one or a whole mess of files in a batch Windows and Mac versions Tiny footprint Industry-leading technology at a bargain price Free Trial available Download manual without purchasing Tremendous support

Cons Manual leaves out a few details No video Editing (but not designed as an Editor anyway)..