A recently-released Mac tool that's moving into its new PC home, Roxio Crunch is an application designed to take video files and shrink them down to an iPod or mobile phone-friendly size. Assuming, given the drop-down options, that your mobile phone is made by Apple.

Once installed, Crunch pops up the regulatory 'You Must Not Copy Lots Of Things Illegally' notice, and then drops you at a fairly simple and clear opening screen. The left pane of this screen invites you to add movies, be they existing video files (with the likes of MPEG-2 and DivX among the supported formats) or sitting on an optical disc of your choice (and you can select what parts of a DVD you want to compress, heeding those warnings of legality), and these then get added to the list that sits just below.

Shifting over to the right-hand pane, it's similarly simple: here, the drop-down offers you output options based around the iPod and the iPhone (broken down into standard, fastest, and high quality), with an Options button to tinker with if those devices don't necessarily apply (where you can opt for H.264 or MPEG-4 output).

And that is as tough as the learning curve gets. Because once you've made those decisions, most of which you're likely to know the answer to before you install the program in the first place, you then pick whether to output to a file or to iTunes, and you're away.

Given that Roxio Crunch is a specific tool for a specific job, it's both pleasing and sensible that it streamlines its focus down to just that task. The process of getting from A to B is as utterly straightforward as you'd desire it to be, and it also goes about its video conversion work reasonably quickly. It doesn't ultimately do much, but you can't grumble about how it does it.

For PC owners, though, it's still very Apple-facing, courtesy of a selection of output options that may as well have the Apple logo all over them. If you're looking to compress video for viewing on an iPod then that's not a problem, of course, and that's what the majority of purchasers will probably be looking for. In fact, it makes the software really quite desirable.

But should your portable viewing device be of another flavour, then there are tools a little more obviously targeted to your needs available elsewhere. They may not be quite as clean as Roxio Crunch, but chances are they'll also offer you some economy over the £29.99 asking price.

A tidy tool whose simplicity is its big selling point. Ideal if you're outputting to Apple devices, less than vital to everyone else.