VisualHub: More Codecs Than You Can Shake a Stick At

With the Internet moving more and more towards a full multimedia experience every day, it’s understandable that one of the biggest things people want to spread for the world to see is video. Sure, there are sites like YouTube or MetaCafé that let users easily upload videos, but they don’t offer a lot of control over video size and quality. The real solution for pros is to encode your own video. One great solution for doing this on the Mac is VisualHub.

Encoding video is somewhat of an arcane art, with all sorts of things to worry about from resolution to bitrate to frame rate. VisualHub acts as a big brother to Techspansion’s other encoding app, iSquint, and takes a results-oriented approach to this issue by essentially asking the question, “What do you want to do with this video?” You are offered presets for iPod, AppleTV, PSP, DVD, and many more formats. This entire process is very simple, and you don’t have to worry about all the technical details behind what you’re doing.

VisualHub makes it easy to quickly create a video that matches a certain format if you’re a novice, but if you’d like to play around with specifics, you can do that too. Most likely, though, you’ll be able to do everything you need from the app’s main window. For example, in the tabs of the various formats, you’re provided with a quality slider ranging from “Tiny” to “Go Nuts.” One particularly cool feature of VisualHub is being able to quickly convert any video format into a Final Cut-ready DV movie. (Of course, this feature will be moot once Final Cut Studio 2 comes out, but it is useful nonetheless.)

For the often-opaque process of encoding videos, VisualHub is really a one-stop shop. Given the amount of options in the app, you can play around with various formats and find one that suits your needs. VisualHub is $23.32 from Techspansion. For anyone working with video on a daily basis, it’s definitely worth every penny.