File Conversions: Software based or web application?
If your work demands significant usage of computers and working with many different task, then converting files, documents, images, or many of the other major file formats is most likely an important part of your daily tasks. In a perfect world, we would have one file standard, but this is not the case. There are many websites and each provide an limited amount of support/services for accepting different kind's of a file formats. For example while YouTube accepts videos in almost any format, a custom made website of your client might not be configured to work with MOV or AVI files. Similar is the case with documents. While PDF is accepted by almost everyone, certain website, due to their nature and concept accept only a particular kind of a file like a word document. The most frustrating of the formats are the images. They have an extensive amount of extensions – JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG and the list goes on that it is hard to remember preferences for every website.
File conversion is a BIG deal and with it, the big question will arises... What is the quickest and simplest solution for converting between each file type? There are applications that can do this job (like Video Converters) but installing an application and then troubleshooting it if it does not work is more a pain than a solution. Also, when installing programs directly onto your computer or mobile device, will put you at risk for downloading adware and location tracker, which could be wrapped into the program.
The second solution (and the better one) is to use web based services, like Convertio.co. This particular company supports 1727 different conversions:(Videos, Audios, Documents, EBooks, Presentations, Images, Archives etc, Split/Compress/Unlock pdf, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
URL Converter (extract media from websites), convert and download YouTube videos, and a
Developer-friendly File Conversion API). There are hundreds of companies like this one, but I feel you can accomplish most of your tasks on this one site.
Why a web-based service is better than trusting random software applications? Let me give you 3 reasons why.
The cost of implementation is low when it comes to a web based service. Software doing the same thing will cost you a few hundred dollars and use up your computer resources which can be overwhelming, whereas a web-based file conversion service is less than 10 dollars a month and does not hog up on your computer resources.
As the creator of the software keeps adding features, you need to update your software to get the latest algorithms for conversions. However, in case of a web-based service you do not need to worry about getting the latest updates and adding more conversion options. The owner of the website takes care of all this.
If you choose software to convert audios and videos, the time that will go into completing the process will depend on the configuration of your machine. If you compare the specifications of your machine to the high end servers that the websites use, your machine will probably take 10 times more time than what a web based service will need to convert the same file.
