Mediavatar Media Toolkit Ultimate review

Mediavatar’s Media Toolkit Ultimate includes five products that are usually sold on their own for around £20 each, including converters for Blu-ray video, DVD video, other types of video files, audio files, and a combined YouTube downloader and converter.

With the exception of the YouTube video converter, all the programs share the same interface, so once you have learned how to use one, you will easily pick up the others. The suite converts almost any type of video or audio file and programs support many popular (and obscure) file formats. Whatever your device (PC, Mac, smartphone, tablet, games console, iPod), you should be able to convert audio and video to play on it.

Experienced users will enjoy tweaking the settings precisely, while more occasional users can use presets; there is support for iPhone, Wii and Playstation 3, among many others. If you want multiple versions of the same file for different devices, the software will handle all the conversions at once, instead of making you convert each file individually.

The YouTube converter works differently. Having chosen your desired file format, it takes you to the site where you can search for a video and then download and convert it.

Apart from the occasional audio hiccup when converting parts of a homemade DVD, the Toolkit performed well. But a minor annoyance with the suite is that you need to register each program individually.

Of course, people who create music and video have the right to protect their content, and you are responsible for not infringing copyright. But when there is a legitimate reason for converting files, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the Mediavatar Media Toolkit Ultimate. Even if you only need a few programs, it is such good value that there is little point in buying them separately.