PowerToys Lets You Quickly Convert Videos and Audio Files on Windows 11

As a veteran Windows user, I swear by PowerToys as it’s one of the best utilities on Windows 11 that improves my experience and productivity manyfold. I use it to extract text from images, remap keys, launch the Run tool like macOS, and much more. Now, Microsoft has expanded the feature set, with the PowerToys Advanced Paste tool adding support for video and audio file conversion in the 0.89.0 update. Unlike other video converters, PowerToys does it blazingly fast without wasting time.

I generally use HandBrake to convert videos to other formats, but with the latest PowerToys update, I no longer need to rely on another video converter app. Sure, HandBrake is much more advanced and can output videos in various formats, but PowerToys takes the cake for quick video conversion.

PowerToys can transcode a variety of video formats and output the video in MP4 format (H.264 for video and AAC for audio). For testing, I tried MOV, MKV, and WMV video files, and it successfully converted those videos into MP4 format. However, for some reason, it couldn’t process WEBM and AVI videos.

Nevertheless, you can convert a wide variety of videos and audio files to audio-only MP3 format. Not only that, you can convert various image files to PNG images. So, it covers multiple media types including videos, audio files, and images.

Media Conversion Comes to Advanced Paste in PowerToys

Microsoft has baked in media conversion to its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys. Simply update PowerToys to the latest 0.89.0 version and enable the Advanced Paste module. You can now copy a media file (Ctrl + C) and then press the “Windows + Shift + V” shortcut to bring up the Advanced Paste window.

Here, click on “Transcode to .mp4” to convert and paste the video in MP4 format in the same directory, another folder, or app. Similarly, you can also convert any video and audio file to MP3 format as well. Note that it doesn’t support batch processing yet.

What I find interesting is that video conversion happens locally on your Windows machine. There are many online video converters that people use, but they pose privacy risks, and are much slower, compared to PowerToys’ built-in video converter.

You now have one more reason to use PowerToys and make Windows 11 a more feature-rich and customizable operating system. Besides that, I would also recommend Wintoys, which lets you improve performance and enhance Windows 11 with various tweaks.