VisualHub: Keeping Up With Apple
With many different video codecs and formats available today, it is hard to find a device that supports not just them all, but even a reasonable subset of the most popular.
When Apple released the 5G iPod with Video in Oct 2005, the push to take your video content on the road began and new tools started to surface to convert many of the different codecs over to iPod format.
Since AppleTV’s initial release a year ago, the second wave has become the push to move content 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 the race to keep up with Apple.
In less than one year Apple has released not just the iPhone and AppleTV ‘take 2′, but also revised the iPod line with the latest iPod nano, iPod classic and iPod touch. Along the way, VisualHub has been quick to release updates to support each of the Apple releases and updates. VisualHub provides fast conversion from nearly every video format to iPod/iPhone/AppleTV, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG and Flash.
Conversions can be scaled to desired resolutions, cropped, and audio modified. Formats to view directly on television support both NTSC (North America/Japan) and PAL (Europe/everywhere else). All MPEG formats are supported, including MPEG-2. H.264 is supported when converting to MPEG-4 or any of the iTunes supported devices. If you have non-mainstream formated videos such as DivX/XviD AVIs, VisualHub is an ideal tool for converting those to MP4.
VisualHub has become the must-have tool of choice when it comes to converting content for iTunes. Conversions can be optimized for the current selection of Apple devices. There is an option to have concerted content added automatically to iTunes where it will end up in the Movies library by default. The seamless integration with iTunes is a key differentiator from some of the lower-cost/free alternatives.
For a long time VisualHub has provided the ability to process groups of files in batches which can even be stitched together into a single combined video – I’ve found this particularly useful for many small home videos which I don’t want to edit and merge via iMovie. There is support for Xgrid Encoding, wherein if you have multiple Macs on your network with Xgrid Sharing enabled, VisualHub can distribute conversion tasks among those Macs. This is useful when converting multiple files, though be sure to let others who are using those Macs know you’re doing this before they start wondering where all their CPU cycles are disappearing to.
With the most recent release, v1.31, VisualHub adds support for AppleTV 5.1 surround sound. Videos with 5.1 AC3 audio can now be converted to play on AppleTV with the ‘Take 2′ software update from Feb 12th.
VisualHub, a Universal Binary, can be downloaded to try-out (limited to 2-minute conversions) and a full license is available for $23.32. If you want to watch your DVD collection or selection of non-MP4 videos in the living room or on the road, then VisualHub is the conversion tool for you.
[...] Jump on over the MacApper to read the review – VisualHub: Keeping Up With Apple. [...]
This app kicks ass. I’ve never had a problem with it and I’ve put it through a lot. My only real complaint would be that it’s conversion process is a tad slow. Other than that 5 stars all around.
[...] (Via MacApper.) [...]
This is a great app. I was able to pull video off of my DVR with iRecord, and convert it with just a couple of clicks in VisualHub. Can’t wait to do more with it!
I – for one – don’t find it that great. I didn’t get all the “pro” functions I was hoping for. That’s why I rather stick up with free but better MPEG Streamclip.
This program is really cool and I must say that it was one of the first applications I have bought after my transition to the Mac.
One thing which I still don’t really get is why the video support of iTunes is still that bad. What we need with more and more platforms arising is something in iTunes which does exactly the job of all these transformation tools. In fact I want to manage exactly one video in my library but want this one on my Apple TV, my iPhone and my secondary iPod. I also like to keep the orginal one. iTunes already has a nice on-the-fly convertion of music tracks for the iPod shuffle (reducing size by loosing some quality). I want exactly this feature for videos.
My only gripe is that they convert iphone/ipod touch videos inefficiently. 480×320 resolution is TOO BIG for movies. The DPI is higher for the iphone, and you’ll make a video that is too large for the iphone. You can take 144pixels as the height, and multiply that by the aspect ratio of the film and produce a video that looks just as good, and at times half the size.
This program is excellent. It easily converts .mov files into .flv files for uploading to youTube, etc.
Excellent software, highly recommended.
I think it makes the videos bigger so when you double tap to zoom, you are still watching the highest quality
iSquint and VisualHub, the popular video converter on Mac OS X have now gone open source. They also has got new names, Film Redux (VisualHub) and PunyVid (iSquint).