Adapter is a powerful video, audio and image converter

Adapter is a free converter for Windows and Mac that offers an impressive set of features.

There are lots of methods and options to convert media into different formats. From the excellent Freemake Video Converter to dozens of other programs and various online solutions.

If you are new to the club, you need to distinguish your program from others to make a good first impression. Adapter does that and more.

The program relies on ffmpeg for the conversions and suggests to download it during installation. Once that is done it loads the queue that you can use to add supported file types to.

This part of the interface is streamlined for ease of use.  Media that you add are displayed with various information including a preview thumbnail, playing time, resolution or size.

A menu at the bottom of the interface displays the conversion formats that Adapter makes available. The formats are sorted by type first, video, audio or image, and then by format or device.

Profiles are available for various devices from Microsoft, Apple or Sony including the Xbox, Kindle Fire, iPhone 4s or Android phones but also for generic purposes.

Adapter calculates the size of the destination format automatically which takes a couple of seconds usually.

A click on the cog wheel icon in the interface displays detailed information about the selected format as well as other preferences that may be of importance to you.

Here you find listed important video, resolution and audio preferences such as bit rate, frame rate or resolution which you can modify. Most values are set to be the same as source, but it is possible to make modifications right here.

Here you also find the trim feature which unlike other preferences here affects only the selected source file and not all of them.

You can enable a preview pane with a click on a button as well. It displays source and output format next to each other so that you can compare the two easily.

It is possible to modify the preview duration of 5 seconds to another value, and move the separator to the left or right to display more or less of the source or target format in the area.

The same preview option becomes available when you add images to the queue to convert them to other images. Audio conversions on the other hand offer a slightly different preview option as you can play the source or output format only separately.

It is interesting to note that you can turn images into video formats, and video formats into audio only files using the program.

As far as support for different file types is concerned: it is quite good. I did not run into any compatibility issues during tests. Note though that formats such as flac or wmv are not supported as output formats while they are supported as sources.

Verdict

Adapter is a powerful media converter for Windows and Mac that does a great job of hiding advanced options in its interface without moving them too far away. In fact, it only takes a click to display them in the interface to preview selections or modify output settings.

Adapter is without doubt one of the best media converters that I have come across in recent time. Recommended.