I was reading the archive threads about converters and the latest i could find was a lil over 1 year old.

With Technology moving so fast what is the latest and greatest converter to convert video format to FLV and or FLS format?

Any try before you buy suggestions...

Free would be great too!

I used to use a freebie called SUPER, dunno if it's still out there.

Among the freeware, Super-C is great (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html), perhaps the best of them.

The freeware encoders all render to free codecs, such as the original Sorenson Spark Video codec for flash (poor picture quality for a given bitrate, compared to today's standards), or, to h.264 aka MPEG4 (best quality of any codec in general use, but, decode complexity is very high).

It's clear h.264 is the future. Reasonable people may disagree with me on this, but I think it isn't the best choice for general online distribution of video today. That online visitor who may have broadband, but is running an old celeron/amd laptop at 1.2 GHz and 1GB of ram won't have the same experience of it as someone who's purchased a new computer in the last couple years. The decode of h.264 really does hit the processor hard.

I think the sweet spot is the first flash codec that actually looked good, On2's VP6 codec. It's been out for 3 years or more, so people's flashplayers generally already have the codec, and the picture quality for bitrate is quite good, almost as good as WMV.

Used to be that you had to spend hundreds to get an encoder with this, but now, On2 is selling a lite version of their Flix encoder for $40 (http://www.on2.com/index.php?387). And yes, there's a demo version.

OTOH, if you're distributing to an online audience that might be expected to have good access and more recent computers, h.264 is darn good, and you can encode it straight out of Vegas using the QT MPEG4 template.

Among the freeware, Super-C is great (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html), perhaps the best of them.

The freeware encoders all render to free codecs, such as the original Sorenson Spark Video codec for flash (poor picture quality for a given bitrate, compared to today's standards), or, to h.264 aka MPEG4 (best quality of any codec in general use, but, decode complexity is very high).

.

I've used Super a lot, but be advised the link Seth provides is confusing because the first download button is NOT for Super. You have to click a few times to find the proper button. SUPER has always done it this way and I have no idea why.