Why Can't Good Video Software Be Free?

By Callie Richards
You can get a lot of decent pieces of software online, but none of them will do the work of a professional piece of software. You may wonder why there's not more quality software available for free. There are some good reasons for this.

Not all videos are created equally. If you've spent any amount of time trying to view videos online or trying to record your own videos with a digital video recorder, you've encountered the wide variety of digital formats that are available. There are dozens of formats and several of them that are popular, like avi, mpeg, wmv, mov, and flv.

What a lot of people don't realize is that each of these formats is packaged in another program, called a codec. Codecs are the packages that help facilitate the different software that allows you to view movies. Many of these codecs are patented. Each piece of video software is the result of a dedicated team of programmers and a company to back them up. Moreover, each video software creator has to pay royalties to the creator of the codecs in exchange for using the technology with their software.

When you download free video software, you are running the risk of two different things. The free software may not be as functional as paid software because the software uses royalty free codecs only. In the second case, the developers may be avoiding royalty fees and illegally distributing software that uses codecs subject to royalties.

Although free video software can allow you to save money, you're really wasting your time in one case or participating in theft in another. Most people don't want to be part of illegal activity while they are converting, editing, or otherwise processing video. Even if your free video software is legit, you won't be able to save, edit and convert all of the available video file types.

If you want to get the most out of your videos and be able to convert, rip, edit and burn videos in any format, you need a high quality video software package. The developers of Movavi VideoSuite remit all royalty payments to the right codec companies. This makes it a comprehensive and helpful program.

You can waste your time trying to get by with incomplete free video software, and potentially participating in a legal activity. Or you can pay for a quality software like Movavi VideoSuite and actually accomplish what you want to with your videos.

Check out Best Video Editing Software here.