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.
Looks like a nice app – price tag isn’t so attractive though.
(submitted @ tweako)
Seeing as you like it so much why did you only give it 3/5?
$23.32 for what it does is great. I bought it a few months back because I had to convert a bunch of .avi videos from a friends digital camera into a format that I could drag into iMovie or Final Cut. I was using media-convert.com and zamzar.com but it took forever, in fact, it was about 10 or so minutes in between each video to convrt and I was dealing with 10-15 2-3 minute videos. I got frustrated and looked for an inexpensive software option, found visual hub and was extrememly pleased with the results. Time is money and if you value your time, visual hub is definitely worth the price tag.
[...] Visual Hub – Previously used sites like media-convert.com and zamzar.com to re-encode videos to a format which I could work with. Visual Hub does that and a lot more and won’t take nearly as long. [...]
[...] into the living room. Leading the pack on the Mac platform is VisualHub from Techspansion. MacApper originally reviewed VisualHub back in April of 2007. With this post we’ll revisit VisualHub to see how far it has come in [...]
I have used this app extensively and can tell you there is no other like it. From the ease of use, to the advanced options and the reliability, this app is a five star app with no competition. One thing not mentioned is the ability to rip DVDs, burn DVDs, and cluster several jobs over a span of several networked Macs using Xgrid. And with multi-core Macs, Xgrid can allow one Mac to work on multiple jobs simultaneously. Each core gets a video to work on. Before VisualHubâ„¢, exporting with QT Playerâ„¢ was a laugh at best… Now there are true results within our life-time. The price is right for this product. I paid once, and get free updates at least once a year.