SUPER © Review
Note: Before publishing this review I tried to contact eRightSoft to get their comments and reaction. I tried all the email addresses listed at their website and they all bounced. So here is the review without rebuttal...
Super © is quirky. Even the name is a little strange — I've never seen an application using the copyright mark as part of its name. Along the way you'll notice a few other odd things about this software, starting with the website and download process. The homepage greets you with a message saying "Enable your browser's Javascript to access this site". It goes away and redirects to a real page but it's a poor first impression.
The download page is quite counter-intuitive and I found myself being redirected back to the same page several times. After reading more of the documentation I realised that this must be a common complaint — the documentation told me to check that I have JavaScript enabled plus a few other things (none of which apply to me), then says "We do not know any other answer to give." Hmm, second impression not so good either. Eventually I did download the file but it felt very hit-and-miss getting there.
Once I installed it things got better. It's a fairly simple interface, but again, quirky. Check out the way the Close/Minimise buttons are hidden behind a mysterious message (it says "Right-click for menu", although you actually have to right-click elsewhere to get a useful menu):
To convert files, you drag them onto the application (from My Computer or whatever you use). There are also options to import files in the right-click menu. When using the drag-and-drop method it is a quite annoying that SUPER © keeps jumping back to the centre of the monitor. I found that I have to have My Computer open in a tiny little window off to one side while SUPER © hogs the middle of the monitor.
The application jumps around at other times as well. For example, if you click the "Player Options" button the whole application moves to a different part of the monitor and the options window opens alongside. There's no obvious way to close the options window until you realise you need to click the same button again (not hard to figure out but a close button would be more intuitive).
So far I haven't said much nice about this app but it's not all bad. The quirks are not serious — what matters is how well the conversions work.
I have to say the conversions work well. There are lots of file types supported and I haven't experienced many real problems. A number of our MC Media Player users convert to FLV and despite lack of support for metadata, most users seem happy. I have used SUPER © to reduce file sizes, fix audio problems and general transcoding work. With rare exceptions it handles these tasks just fine.
There are some strange issues, for example, the AVI/DV output has only one aspect ratio option: 5:4. Why? There are two standards for DV video and neither of them are 5:4 (they are of course 4:3 and 16:9).
Summary
SUPER © is free. As it says on the website, this free application does what many paid applications can't. The fact that all necessary codecs are built-in is a big plus. If you were paying for this, you might be a bit annoyed by some of the strange behaviour but it's free.
You have nothing to lose — SUPER © is definitely worth having in your toolkit.