Best / Quickest formats to convert to/from?

[FatRakoon]

This is a silly question in many ways, but one that I am sure a few people would like to know about?

Video File formats
Sure, there are many many of them now, and there are so many video and audio formats and they seem to cross-breed into all kinds of weird and wonderful formats, but when converting some files lately, I have noticed that the converting of X to Ycan often be, not just a little bit quicker, or slower then converting to Z, but sometimes it can be incredibly vastly different!

For example,
Just tonight, I have converted a file from MKV to MP4 ( I forget which exact codecs but there was no resizing or any other change other than file format ) and it took 6 minutes.
Then, a short while ago, I wanted to convert the same file into a WMV and its taken so long, that I have not only opened up the laptop to reply to an email, and I have replied to that email, I am stil watching the file and its still chugging along, and it is 78% done, has been converting for 32 minutes and has a further 7 minutes to go!

Why such a huge difference?

Same app to do it, same CPU % used ( more or less - its about 72% used )

What would be the quickest file type to convert to?

I am sure that the file type its converting from would make a difference too I suspect, but can anyone give any info to answer my thoughts?

Thanks.

 

[FatRakoon]

Why WMV?

Well, this is a second parter to a question I asked a short while earlier as I am simply looking for a program to cut up videos for our club, but the apps seem to be either rubbish, or expensive.

The issue with WMV came up simply because I had given Windows movie maker a shot and that seemed to want to import WMV and so the plan seemed to entail me converting my format into WMV to them inport into Movie Maker!

I just need a simple app that does a simple job and I seem to be going around the houses to get it done.

At this time, I have managed it, using an old version of Cyber Director that I found on a Disk, but my test file started off as a 100MB MVK and I have ended up with 2 files that are MPeG and are 250MB and 310MB, so clearly not a good sign.