Comparison of 7 video converters: Converting a 720p mkv to 480p H.264

[srk]

Background:
Few days ago I saw this guy post a 84 MB video (let's say default.mp4) online that had the same quality as another 164 MB default.format video. I asked the guy how he did it. He sent me the instructions full of command lines. I am guessing the instructions are pretty detailed for an expert, but being a noob, I decided to try out 7 GUI based video conversion softwares with the same settings (to make this experiment as controlled as possible) to see how each performs, and how good of a size to quality ratio I can get.

Reason for choosing H.264:
After lots of research, I found H.264 to have the best size-quality ratio.


The softwares are:

• AVS Video Converter 6.3 (Commercial)
• FormatFactory 2.5 (Free)
• iWisoft Free Video Converter (Free)
• MediaCoder 0.7.5.4740 x64 (Free & Open Source)
• SUPER (Free)
• WinAVI AIO Converter 1.1.0.3897 (Commercial)
• Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate 6.0.4 (Commercial)

Subject:
A 1.1 GB 720p mkv video.

Objective:
Get the best size-quality ratio at 480p within a reasonable time frame.

Note:
I have heard good things about Handbrake, but I heard experts say that the GUI does not produce as good of a result as the CLI. And I am CLI-phobic. I have used Handbrake GUI in the past, and I didn't really get a good size to quality ratio within a reasonable time.

Here are my findings:
7zip: http://www.mediafire.com/?4yxy2etly5i7f63
Zip: http://www.mediafire.com/?l14f9uz06qqeqv9

I have made a folder for each software.
In each folder you will find-
- a screenshot of the settings
- a screenshot of the converted video
- technical info about the converted video
- a small summary of my findings about the conversion process and the output.

If you are too lazy, or don't have time, here are my final thoughts:

Winner: MediaCoder
I found MediaCoder to be the most powerful of all these softwares. It produced similar size-quality ratio (if not better) as the other top performers, within similar time frame. And MediaCoder did it at 720p while others did it at 480p. I later ran another trial on MediaCoder with some tweaked settings for better quality. MediaCoder produced a file with better size-quality ratio, but it took just over 3 hours to do it (average being 1 hour).

Honorable Mention: FormatFactory
FormatFactory produced very similar size-quality ratio as MediaCoder, at 480p, and within a very reasonable time frame.

Disclaimer:
Better results can (probably) be achieved with all of these softwares by tweaking the settings. But for the sake of controlled experiment, the settings on all 7 of the softwares were kept as same as possible.
I am also posting this on some other video conversion forums to get feedback from multiple angles.

[Baldrick]

All are probably using x264 encoder but with different configs.

[Valnar]

All are probably using x264 encoder but with different configs.

Yep...the gui is irrelevant. It's whatever the author made the default settings, I suppose.