Creating your own home movies is easy and affordable these days, thanks to tough competition in the digital video camera market. Sharing them, though? That's another matter. Re-encoding a video so that it'll be small enough to email or download is usually a hit and miss affair, involving lots of guessing about the best resolution, bit rate, encoding scheme, and so on. Get just one of these factors wrong and the finished file might be too large, or too small, forcing you to start the whole laborious process again.

Ashampoo Movie Shrink & Burn 2005 takes the guesswork out of this process, though, ensuring you get the best possible results in the minimum amount of time. Just tell the program which video file you want to convert (common formats like .avi, .wmv, .mov, .mpg, and .asf are supported), give it a target size in megabytes, click Start and leave the encoding engine to do its work. Once complete you can have either a Windows Media Video 9 (.wmv) or QuickTime MPEG-4 (.mov) file, almost exactly of the size you specified, ready to email, put on your web site, or whatever else you want to do with it.

Time-saving extras include the ability to split files into chunks, for instance, perhaps useful when a video is too large to email in one go. The program can also burn your converted video files to CD once it's finished, without requiring other mastering software. And there's the option to create movies specifically for playback in PDAs, where file size and video resolution are particularly important.

The latest incarnation of Movie Shrink & Burn creates movie CDs in DivX, VCD or SVCD formats, that work with most DVD players. And it can also convert your movies to many more file types, including MPEG-4 and DivX .avi, .MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and .vob. It's considerably more versatile, then, and yet instead of the £29.99 list price, Ashampoo are only asking you to pay an exceedingly reasonable £7.49. Click Help > Buy / Register > Upgrade to Ashampoo Movie Shrink & Burn 2 to find out more.