The days when video came in one of two formats – VHS or Betamax – are of course long gone, and nowadays it can be difficult to keep up with the amount of different video technologies available. While its good news that innovation continues to bring movie file sizes down and push quality up, it causes no end of confusion when it comes to recoding, managing and sharing your videos. Hero Video Convert is here to save the day though, allowing you to convert video files between a huge range of formats.

With support for VCD, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVI, GIF, and more, the application acts as a one-stop-shop for transferring media into different formats. Very few of Hero’s rivals can profess to embrace such a wide range of formats, and luckily the sheer number of conversion options doesn’t affect the ease of use of the application, thanks to a well organized and compact tabbed interface. The supplementary features are also easy to access, allowing you to pull off cool tricks such as batch conversion, video resizing and a choice of audio codec.

No superhero is infallible though, and just as Superman was no good at handling kryptonite, Hero Video Convert has its weaknesses too. For instance, the quality of the compressed video is perhaps not as the results you’d get in some of the other conversion apps around, especially when it comes to audio syncing. Also, the quality and range of documentation available could also do with a bit of improvement.

With that said, Hero Video Convert still packs a mighty punch, allowing you to reliably convert video to and from almost any format you can think of. It’s incredibly simple to use too, making it ideal for beginners as well as seasoned video geeks.