The Participatory Culture Foundation recently released another update to Miro, its flagship open video player and platform. But perhaps even more interesting is the announcement and release of a brand new product: Miro Converter.

As its name implies, this new title makes the task of converting video among different formats a dead simple one: drag a file, select what format you need it in and wait for Miro Converter do its magic.

Of course, Miro defaults to Theora for all transcoding but it can also output in MP4 format for a variety of portable devices including most iPod/iPhone generations, PSP, and several cell phones including Droid / Milestone, Nexus One, G1, Magic / myTouch, Droid Eris , HTC Hero, Cliq, and Behold.

For input, it can take QuickTime, AVI, H264, MKV, FLV (Flash video),  Xvid and Windows Media Video.

All this is possible thanks to ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora, a powerful transcoding engine that unfortunately lacked a really simple interface end users could be able to try.

Miro converter brings that simple user interface and with great timing as the fight for a dominant video format engages between Theora, the open alternative, and H264, a patent plagued format that could become a limitation for video content creation.

Miro Converter brings open video much closer to everybody, and is part of the Let’s get Video on Wikipedia campaign announced a few weeks ago. Capture video suitable for Wikipedia with your digital camera, convert it with Miro Converter, and upload it enrich Wikipedia.

Get Miro Converter now, available for Windows and Mac (no Linux version right now).