I must admit that AVCfree is a really convenient video converter and it has become my favorite, which is the reason I was surprised that much when suddenly stopped working as expected. I did not even find familiar options so many times used before! Finally I configured as best as I could the conversion, only to find out that it wouldn’t let me preview the output!

Then I remembered that the program was updated recently. I guessed that things changed for the worse or options were removed for the commercial version of the program to be promoted. Fortunately both of those guesses were incorrect. After the program’s update a preference of mine was forgotten, and this small change caused all that trouble.

If you want to use AVCfree to embed subtitles to a video or just convert it to some other format, take care to choose carefully the target device. If you choose e.g. Sony PS3, then problems begin, you have limitations in your options, you cannot use any encoder you like and you cannot even preview the result before conversion is finished.

I choose to convert my files as “customized AVI” and this option is really great, because then AVCfree lets you automatically select the original resolution as the output’s target, it lets you use xvid as the encoder, which is really fast, and it lets you preview the output immediately, even in real time. If you let 1% to be completed, which is less than a minute, you can even skip the initial companies promo and get directly to the first scenes where you can see the subtitles, their size, font family, placement, etc., to make sure your video appears as intended.