Movavi's Upgraded, Online Video Conversion Service

The good folks at Russian video software firm Movavi gave their online video converter a big boost today. Loaded with new features, it's now arguably the service of choice for when you need to translate a video from one format to another and don't want to muck with installing software on your PC.

First, Movavi has increased the number of supported file formats considerably. XviD AVI, MPEG-4 (in various resolutions), MPEG-2 (PAL or NTSC), 3GP (for cellphones), and even Flash FLV files are all supported. Videos can be uploaded from your PC or selected from a website: Just paste in URLs from YouTube, iFilm, Metacafe, or one of seven other online video services to convert the file for easy downloading. And there's a nifty feature that lets you convert up to five files and combine them into one large file, perfect for joining together multi-part clips.

Want more? How about a video conversion widget for your Facebook page?

Is there a downside? Well, yes: To get your converted files you have to give Movavi an email address and wait... and wait... for them to be converted. When they're done, Movavi sends you a message letting you know they can be collected. The sample files I converted took between one and ten hours to finish. Movavi says the wait can be as long as 24 hours. Yikes. Gotta do something about that lag, folks. (Oh, and the email notifications were flagged as spam by both of my spam filters.)

Despite its minor flaws, Movavi's file format support, high-quality transfers, and nifty bonus features make it my top pick for video conversion now... at least if I'm not in a hurry.

Get more online file conversion and online video downloading tools here.