XMedia Recode 3.6.3.8

XMedia Recode 3.6.3.8 arrived on 16 August 2026, and it is free in the plain sense of the word: no trial clock, no watermark, no paid edition waiting behind a greyed-out button.

It is a Windows program written and maintained by one German developer, Sebastian Dörfler, who has been shipping updates every month or two since 2007.

Underneath the window it is FFmpeg, which is exactly why people keep coming back to it.

What XMedia Recode Actually Does

You drag a file in, choose what you want out, and press Encode. It reads nearly everything FFmpeg reads, including DVD folders, Blu-ray disc structures, camera footage and downloaded streams.

On the way out it writes MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV, WebM, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, FLV and 3GP on the video side, and MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, Opus, Vorbis, AC3 and WMA on the audio side. It will also copy a stream through untouched, which is how you change a file's container without re-encoding it and without losing a single frame of quality.

That last trick is the one most free converters do not offer, and it is the reason people who own HandBrake still keep this installed.

Presets for the Impatient, Every Knob for Everyone Else

The Format tab carries device profiles for Apple, Samsung, Sony, Xiaomi, Huawei, LG and a long list of others, so "make this play on my phone" is roughly two clicks.

Ignore the presets and the encoder settings are all there in the open: rate control mode, bitrate, CRF, keyframe interval, B-frames, psy-RD, HDR metadata and per-codec options that most free tools never expose at all. The screenshots give you a fair idea of how dense those tabs get.

Hardware encoding is available through NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF and Intel Quick Sync, which turns an overnight HEVC job into a coffee break at some cost in quality. If the difference between decoding, encoding and transcoding is fuzzy, our guide on what those words actually mean is a short read.

What Is New in 3.6.3.8

This one is a codec refresh rather than a feature release.

• Updated FFmpeg, the library doing the actual work underneath.
• Updated the AOM AV1 encoder to 3.14.1.
• Updated SVT-AV1 to 4.2.0, the faster of the two AV1 encoders it carries.
• Minor bug fixes.

Earlier 3.6.x builds are where the bigger additions landed: the AOM AV1 quantization panel, the SVT-AV1 GOP size and type controls, and an x264 refresh. Changelogs elsewhere on the web tend to merge all of those into one list, which makes this release look busier than it is.

What You Need Before You Install

If your machine is stuck on an older NVIDIA driver, the developer still hosts build 3.5.8.8 on the same download page for driver 418.81 and up. AMD needs Adrenalin Edition 19.7.1 or newer, and Intel Quick Sync needs a Skylake CPU or later.

Supported systems are Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11. There is a 32-bit build, a separate Windows XP SP3 and Vista build for genuinely old machines, and a portable version that runs from a folder or a USB stick with nothing installed.

Where It Sits in an Encoding Chain

XMedia Recode is a front end, so the quality you get out of it belongs to the encoders running inside it.

H.264 output goes through x264 and H.265 through x265, both of which are the same encoders the paid converters use. AV1 goes through either SVT-AV1 or the slower, more thorough AOM reference encoder, and our guide on why AV1 keeps turning up explains what you gain by putting up with the wait.

Playing the results back is a separate problem. Windows needs the AV1 Video Extension before Movies and TV will open an AV1 file at all.

If you only need to change a container or shuffle audio tracks around, MKVToolNix does that job faster and without an encode. For playback of whatever you produce, K-Lite Codec Pack covers the system-wide case.

Or skip the install entirely and use VLC, which carries its own decoders, or MPC-HC if you want something lighter.

Not sure what is inside the file you are trying to convert in the first place? Our free Codec Finder will tell you in the browser, before you pick an output format.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell is the first screen. If seven tabs of settings makes you want to close the window, this is the wrong tool and there is no shame in that.

• You want the shortest path from file to MP4 - HandBrake and VidCoder ask far fewer questions.
• You have 300 files to grind through overnight - ShanaEncoder is built around batch jobs.
• You need trimming, subtitle burn-in and conversion in one pass - Shutter Encoder covers more editing ground.
• You are chasing the last few percent of AV1 quality - FastFlix and StaxRip expose more of the encoder.
• You are not on Windows - there is no Mac or Linux build, and there never has been one.

Every one of those is free as well, so switching costs you nothing but a download. If you would rather learn the command line and stop using front ends altogether, our GUI versus CLI comparison lays out the trade fairly.

Everything else in this corner of the site lives under Video Encoders, which runs to 88 tools.

Quick questions

Download XMedia Recode 3.6.3.8 and see how it handles your files, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.