MediaEspresso is a fast and powerful media conversion tool that will quickly convert video, music or image files into the format you need.

The program has direct support for the iPad, iPod, Xbox, PSP/ PS3, and many mobile phones and media players. And so there's none of the complexities here that you'll find with other transcoding tools. Simply drag and drop the files you'd like to convert onto the program, choose an output profile - an iPad, say - then click OK to accept the default settings and leave MediaEspresso to do its work. Once the process has finished your files can be directly synced to your device, transferred to the iTunes library, even uploaded to YouTube or Facebook - whatever you like.

Excellent video format support means the program is able to import all these file types: MKV (default subtitle), RM/RMVB, FLV NEW AVI, MPEG, MPEG-2, MOV (H.264), WMV, MP4, DVR-MS, .TS, MPG, ASF, M2T, M2TS, MTS, DV-AVI, TiVo, VOB, VRO, MOD, DAT, TOD and WTV (single channel). Export options are more limited, as you can only convert videos to MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-4 AVC, WMV or DivX formats, but that should still be enough for most purposes.

New in this version is the ability to convert some music or image files. There's not such a wide range of formats supported here (wma, mp3, m4a and BMP, JPEG, PNG), but it remains a welcome addition.

If you need to regularly convert large files, though, what you'll probably appreciate most of all is MediaEspresso's speed. The program uses multiple threads to make the most of every CPU core, and will automatically use NVIDIA CUDA or ATI Stream, if available, to accelerate the conversion process. It's even able to transcode up to 6 files at the same time, and so will squeeze the maximum possible performance out of your system.

Please note, this trial version is not only limited to 30 days use, but it will also convert videos to the H.264 format 50 times only. So use your conversions carefully. The full version has no limitations.

Review by Mike Williams.