When building a website or saving files to a computer, most people notice that different types of files use different amounts of space on your website or computer hard drive. The amount of space that is used depends on the type of file. For example, a basic text document uses very little space, a picture uses slightly more, and a video takes up even more space. This is one of the biggest reasons that you would want to convert video files. Another major reason to convert video files is due to compatibility issues and the final reason that some people convert video files is called pirating.

By simply converting your video files into Macromedia Flash files, you will save tremendous amounts of space on your hard drive or web site. There is very little degradation of video associated with this type of conversion, so it will not affect the appearance or quality of your video. The normal human eye cannot even distinguish the difference between the slight slow down of the video. This conversion is probably the best for saving disk space, but many other conversions may be required due to incompatibility issues.

A major incompatibility issue comes with Apple products like iPod and iPhone. In a few years, Apple and Microsoft may learn to play nicely and the average user will be able to just transfer a video file from a Windows based computer directly onto an iPod, iPhone or other Apple device. However, for now, the iPod owner must convert video into an iPod suitable format. Compatibility is not only an issue between Microsoft and Apple; it is even an issue between Microsoft computers and PDAs. None of the software is 100% compatible, which leads to converting video on a regular basis. Aside from the incompatibility and disk space requirements, people also convert video when burning DVDs that are not 100% legal.

Pirating videos is a federal offense in most cases, so it would be very unethical to give step-by-step instructions on how to perform this video conversion. Be advised that this type of conversion is performed far more frequently and easily than any other type of video conversion I have discussed. This conversion generally changes a video from a computer-based format into a format that will play on most mainstream DVD players.

Have no fear; software is available for all of these converting needs. Take just a few minutes on any search engine and begin swimming through the sea of software at your disposal. Check out reviews of the software and the functionality to make sure it is exactly what you are looking for, and then start converting video between formats whenever you need to.